12.22.08

The Upper Paleolithic, or the Great Explosion, and the eonic effect

Posted in Evolution at 5:25 pm by nemo

Origins of Modern Humans: Multiregional or Out of Africa?
Donald Johanson

One of the strangest things about the Darwin paradigm is the way that flagrantly contradictory evidence simply lies out in the open, undiscussed, and undiscussable (in the sense of being a challenge to Darwinian theory). The issue of the Upper Paleolithic, or late Stone Age, or the African Great Explosion is a case in point. Suddenly within the space of ten thousand years, in what must have been a geographically isolated or focussed zone, a new humanity emerges and begins to spread across the planet. Millions of years of hominids have shown limited, though very real, progression, then suddenly a whole new ball game is completed in an eyeblink of 10k years. The problem is that the evidence is fuzzy, and hard to interpret. We don’t have any models of how the transition could have happened. But it is a dubious strain on belief to simply assume that natural selection, or some lucky mutation suddenly generated this massive change. It doesn’t add up. Clearly natural selection is a cover story.
Wait a minute!
In fact we do now have a model: the eonic effect!!!

The point of this data visible in world history is the way it shows (in a different global context) the way in which an intangible but detectable evolutionary macro process can occur in a directed sequence of transitions separated by what seem to be precise intervals. The same ten thousand year interval since the Neolithic start point suggests something stronger than mere similarity.
This evolutionary process is precisely the kind of transgenetic high-level cultural transformation that produces the behavioral manifestations we see in the new man, from language to art and religion.
The point here is that the eonic model (although not intended to explain the Great Explosion of the upper Paleolithic) is in principle an equal, if not superior, rubric of explanation than the Darwinian. Sorry, but it is so. Which doesn’t make it correct, merely to give some inkling of the way in which Darwinian explanation is constraining thought.

The eonic effect shows that man’s evolution springs from a ‘self-organization’ (the word is picked as a pure descriptive label-abstraction) that is probably just a stage beyond current human intelligence, the reason we are having so much difficulty. But we can, in historical terms, track its movements, stupendous as they are, most visibly in the Axial phase of the eonic effect. There we see that evolution is beyond our easy understanding, but we can ‘see’ it in the sense of historical visualization (if that is the right word) of documented time-periods.
The standard of the eonic effect is data of global nature documented to at least the centuries level. It reminds us therefore of what is lacking for the previous (or any other) period, despite the large-scale resemblance. So, while we wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions, we can remind ourselves of the dangers of assuming anyting about earlier eras if we lack the needed data at the level of centuries.
Nonetheless, the eonic effect by showing us an evolutionary process that we do see and can track, and over the course of world history, deserves to override the misleading and almost crackpot Darwinism that now reigns by default, as a kind of projection on the facts.

Note: this approach shouldn’t be misinterpreted. We can see dramatic changes in a short interval, but it doesn’t follow that men before that transformation were (or were not) different. The eonic effect shows not so much a speciation jump as a jumpstarting relative transformation of something more or less in place already: the realization of potential.

The archaeological picture changed dramatically around 40-50,000 years ago with the appearance of behaviorally modern humans. This was an abrupt and dramatic change in subsistence patterns, tools and symbolic expression. The stunning change in cultural adaptation was not merely a quantitative one, but one that represented a significant departure from all earlier human behavior, reflecting a major qualitative transformation. It was literally a “creative explosion” which exhibited the “technological ingenuity, social formations, and ideological complexity of historic hunter-gatherers.”7 This human revolution is precisely what made us who we are today.

The appearance of fully modern behavior apparently occurred in Africa earlier than anywhere else in the Old World, but spread very quickly, due to population movements into other geographical regions. The Upper Paleolithic lifestyle, as it was called, was based essentially on hunting and gathering. So successful was this cultural adaptation that until roughly 11,000 years ago, hominids worldwide were subsisting essentially as hunter-gatherers.

In the Upper Paleolithic of Eurasia, or the Late Stone Age as it is called in Africa, the archaeological signature stands in strong contrast to that of the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age. It was characterized by significant innovation:

a remarkable diversity in stone tool types

tool types showed significant change over time and space

artifacts were regularly fashioned out of bone, antler and ivory, in addition to stone

stone artifacts were made primarily on blades and were easily classified into discrete categories, presumably reflecting specialized use

burials were accompanied by ritual or ceremony and contained a rich diversity of grave goods

living structures and well-designed fireplaces were constructed

hunting of dangerous animal species and fishing occurred regularly higher population densities

abundant and elaborate art as well as items of personal adornment were widespread

raw materials such as flint and shells were traded over some distances

Homo sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic/Late Stone Age was quintessentially modern in appearance and behavior. Precisely how this transformation occurred is not well understood, but it apparently was restricted to Homo sapiens and did not occur in Neanderthals. Some archaeologists invoke a behavioral explanation for the change. For example, Soffer11 suggests that changes in social relations, such as development of the nuclear family, played a key role in bringing about the transformation.

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