JohnScalesAvery 2012 6CULTURALEVOLUTIONAND InformationTheoryAndE

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Chapter 6
CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND

INFORMATION
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The coevolution of human language, culture, and intelligence

The prehistoric genetic evolution of modern humans, as well as their more
recent cultural evolution can be understood in terms of a single theme
— information. The explosively rapid development of our species can be
thought of as a continually accelerating accumulation of information, as
this chapter will try to demonstrate.
In his Systema Naturae, published in 1735, Carolus Linnaeus correctly
classified humans as mammals associated with the anthropoid apes. How-
ever, illustrations of possible ancestors of humans in a later book by Lin-
naeus, showed one with a manlike head on top of a long-haired body, and
another with a tail. A century later, in 1856, light was thrown on human
ancestry by the discovery of some remarkable bones in a limestone cave in
the valley of Neander, near Düsseldorf — a skullcap and some associated
long bones. The skullcap was clearly manlike, but the forehead was low and
thick, with massive ridges over the eyes. The famous pathologist Rudolf
Virchow dismissed the find as a relatively recent pathological idiot. Other
authorities thought that it was “one of the Cossacks who came from Russia
in 1814”. Darwin knew of the “Neanderthal man”, but he was too ill to
travel to Germany and examine the bones. However, Thomas Huxley ex-
amined them, and in his 1873 book, Zoological Evidences of Man’s Place in
Nature, he wrote: “Under whatever aspect we view this cranium... we meet
with apelike characteristics, stamping it as the most pithecoid (apelike) of
human crania yet discovered”.
“In some older strata,” Huxley continued, “do the fossilized bones of an
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ape more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid, than any yet known await
the researches of some unborn paleontologist?” Huxley’s question obsessed
Eugene Dubois, a young Dutch physician, who reasoned that such a find
119
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120 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION
would be most likely in Africa, the home of chimpanzees and gorillas, or

in the East Indies, where orang-utans live. He was therefore happy to be
appointed to a post in Sumatra in 1887. While there, Dubois heard of a site
in Java where the local people had discovered many ancient fossil bones,
and at this site, after much searching, he uncovered a cranium which was
much too low and flat to have belonged to a modern human. On the other
hand it had features which proved that it could not have belonged to an
ape. Near the cranium, Dubois found a leg bone which clearly indicated up-
right locomotion, and which he (mistakenly) believed to belong to the same
creature. In announcing his find in 1894, Dubois proposed the provocative
name “Pithecanthropus erectus”, i.e., “upright-walking ape-man”.
Instead of being praised for this discovery, Dubois was denounced. His
attackers included not only the clergy, but also many scientists (who had
expected that an early ancestor of man would have an enlarged brain as-
sociated with an apelike body, rather than apelike head associated with
upright locomotion). He patiently exhibited the fossil bones at scientific
meetings throughout Europe, and gave full accounts of the details of the
site where he had unearthed them. When the attacks nevertheless contin-
ued, Dubois became disheartened, and locked the fossils in a strongbox,
out of public view, for the next 28 years. In 1923, however, he released a
cast of the skull, which showed that the brain volume was about 900 cm3
— well above the range of apes, but below the 1200–1600 cm3 range which
characterizes modern man. Thereafter he again began to exhibit the bones
at scientific meetings.
The fossil bones of about 1000 hominids, intermediate between apes
and humans, have now been discovered. The oldest remains have been
found in Africa. Many of these were discovered by Raymond Dart and
Robert Broom, who worked in South Africa, and by Louis and Mary Leaky
and their son Richard, who made their discoveries at the Olduvai Gorge
in Tanzania and at Lake Rudolph in Kenya. Table 6.1 shows some of the
more important species and their approximate dates.
One can deduce from biochemical evidence that the most recent com-
mon ancestor of the anthropoid apes and of humans lived in Africa between
5 and 10 million years before the present. Although the community of
palaeoanthropologists is by no means unanimous, there is reasonably gen-
eral agreement that while A. africanus is probably an ancestor of H. habilis
and of humans, the “robust” species, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus and A.
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CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 121
Table 6.1: Hominid species
Genus and species Years before present Brain volume
Ardipithicus ramidus 5.8 to 4.4 million
Australopithecus anamensis 4.2 to 3.9 million
Australopithecus afarensis 3.9 to 3.0 million 375 to 550 cm3
Australopithecus africanus 3 to 2 million 420 to 500 cm3
Australopithecus aethiopicus 2.6 to 2.3 million 410 cm3
Australopithecus robustus 2 to 1.5 million 530 cm3
Australopithecus boisei 2.1 to 1.1 million 530 cm3
Homo habilis 2.4 to 1.5 million 500 to 800 cm3
Homo erectus 1.8 to 0.3 million 750 to 1225 cm3
Homo sapiens (archaic) 0.5 to 0.2 million 1200 cm3
Homo sapiens neand. 0.23 to 0.03 million 1450 cm3
Homo sapiens sapiens 0.12 mil. to present 1350 cm3
boisei11 represent a sidebranch which finally died out. “Pithecanthropus

erectus”, found by Dubois, is now classified as a variety of Homo erectus,
as is “Sinanthropus pekinensis” (”Peking man”), discovered in 1929 near
Beijing, China.
Footprints 3.7 million years old showing upright locomotion have been
1 A. boisei was originally called ”Zinjanthropus boisei” by Mary and Louis Leakey who
discovered the fossil remains at the Olduvai Gorge. Charles Boise helped to finance the
Leakey’s expedition.
Table 6.2: Paleolithic cultures
Name Years before present Characteristics
Oldowan 2.4 to 1.5 million Africa, flaked pebble tools
Choukoutien 1.2 to 0.5 million chopper tool culture of east Asia
Abbevillian 500,000 to 450,000 crude stone handaxes
Africa, Europe, northeast Asia
Mousterian 70,000 to 20,000 produced by Neanderthal man,
retouched core and flake tools,
wooden spears, fire, burial of dead
Aurignacian 50,000 to 20,000 western Europe, fine stone blades,
pins and awls of bone, fire, cave art
Solutrian 20,000 to 17,000 France and central Europe,
long, pressure-flaked bifacial blades
Magdalenian 17,000 to 10,000 western Europe, reindeer hunting
awls and needles of bone and antler
discovered near Laetoli in Tanzania. The Laetoli footprints are believed to

have been made by A. afarensis, which was definitely bipedal, but upright
locomotion is thought to have started much earlier. There is even indirect
evidence which suggests that A. ramidus may have been bipedal. Homo
habilis was discovered by Mary and Louis Leakey at the Olduvai Gorge,
among beds of extremely numerous pebble tools. The Leakeys gave this
name (meaning “handy man”) to their discovery in order to call special

attention to his use of tools. The brain of H. habilis is more human than
that of A. africanus, and in particular, the bulge of Broca’s area, essential
for speech, can be seen on one of the skull casts. This makes it seem likely
that H. habilis was capable of at least rudimentary speech.
Homo erectus was the first species of hominid to leave Africa, and his
remains are found not only there, but also in Europe and Asia. “Peking
man”, who belonged to this species, probably used fire. The stone tools
of H. erectus were more advanced than those of H. habilis; and there is no
sharp line of demarcation between the most evolved examples of H. erectus
and early fossils of archaic H. sapiens.
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis lived side by side with Homo sapiens
sapiens (modern man) for a hundred thousand years; but in relatively re-
cent times, only 30,000 years ago, Neanderthal man disappeared. Recently
Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropol-
ogy and his group were able sequence the Neanderthal genome. In 2010
Pääbo announced that between 1% and 4% of the genes of modern humans
outside Africa are of Neanderthal origin, the implication being that some
interbreeding took place between Neanderthals and modern humans.
More recently, Svante Pääbo’s group was able to sequence the DNA
from a tooth and finger bone discovered in a cave near Denisova in the
Altai Mountains of Siberia. The DNA was well preserved because of the
cold climate and a nearly-complete genomic sequence was obtained. Amaz-
ingly, Pääbo and his group found that the genome was that of an archaic
hominin that diverged from the Neanderthals approximately 300,000 years
ago, i.e. an eastern cousin of the Neanderthals. Even more amazingly, they
found that between 4% and 6% of the genomes of present-day Melanesians
is shared with the Denisovans. The most probable explanation is that the
Denisovans ranged widely in Eastern Asia at the same time that the Ne-
anderthals occupied the Western Eurasia and the Middle East, and that
modern humans, on their way to Melanesia, interbred with them.
The hominid species shown in Table 6.1 show an overall progression in
various characteristics: Their body size and brain size grew. They began to
mature more slowly and to live longer. Their tools and weapons increased in
sophistication. Meanwhile their teeth became smaller, and their skeletons
more gracile — less heavy in proportion to their size. What were the evo-
lutionary forces which produced these changes? How were they rewarded
by a better chance of survival?
Our ancestors moved from a forest habitat to the savannas of Africa.
Africans
French
Han
Melanesians
Neanderthals
Denisovans
Fig. 6.1 This figure shows schematically the results of DNA sequencing by Svante Pääbo
and his group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Their re-
sults indicate that modern humans outside Africa interbred with Neanderthals, and that
Melanesians and the original people of Australia also interbred with the Denisovans, who
were eastern cousins of the Neanderthals. Interbreeding is indicated by dots connected
by vertical lines. (After Nature).
They changed from a vegetarian diet to an omnivorous one, becoming

hunter-gatherers. The primate hand, evolved for grasping branches in a
forest environment, found new uses. Branches and stones became weapons
and tools — essential to hunters whose bodies lacked powerful claws and
teeth. With a premium on skill in making tools, brain size increased. The
beginnings of language helped to make hunts successful, and also helped in
transmitting cultural skills, such as toolmaking and weaponmaking, from
one generation to the next.
From the time scale shown in Tables 6.1 and 6.2, we can see that the
coevolution of language, culture and intelligence took place over a period
of several million years. As the cultures of the hominids became more
complex, efficient transmission of skills and knowledge between generations
required an increasingly complex language. This in turn required increased
brain size and slow maturation, features which are built into the genomes of
modern humans. A stable family structure and tribal social structure were
also needed to protect the helpless offspring of our species as they slowly
matured.
A modern human baby is almost entirely helpless. Compared with off-
spring of grazing animals, which are able to stand up and follow the herd
immediately after birth, a human baby’s development is almost ludicrously

slow. However, there is nothing slow about the rate at which a young
member of our species learns languages. Between the ages of one and four,
young humans develop astonishing linguistic skills, far surpassing those of
any other animal on earth. In the learning of languages by human children
there is an interplay between genes and culture: The language learned is
culturally determined, but the predisposition to learn some form of speech
seems to be an inherited characteristic. For example, human babies of all
nationalities have a tendency to “babble” — to produce random sounds.
The sounds which they make are the same in all parts of the world, and
they may include many sounds which are not used in the languages which
the babies ultimately learn.
In his book, Descent of Man (John Murray, London, 1871) Charles
Darwin wrote: “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in
the babble of young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to
bake, brew or write”. Thus Darwin was aware of the genetic component
of learning of speech by babies2 . When our ancestors began to evolve a
complex language and culture, it marked the start of an entirely new phase
in the evolution of life on earth.
2 Interestingly, a gene which seems to be closely associated with human speech has
recently been located and mapped by C.S.L. Lai et al, who reported their results in
Nature, 413, 2001. These authors studied three generations of the “KE” family, 15
members of which are afflicted with a severe speech disorder. In all of the afflicted family
members, a gene called FOXP2 on chromosome 7 is defective. In another unrelated
individual, “CS”, with a strikingly similar speech defect, the abnormality was produced
by chromosomal translocation, the breakpoint coinciding exactly with the location of
the FOXP2 gene. A still more recent study of the FOXP2 gene was published online
in Nature AOP on August 14, 2002. The authors (Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski,
Cecilia S.L. Lai, Victor Wiebe, Takashi Kitano, Anthony P. Monaco, and Svante Pääbo)
sequenced the FOXP2 gene and protein in the chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, rhesus
macaque and mouse, comparing the results with sequences of human FOXP2. They
found that in the line from the common ancestor of mouse and man to the point where
the human genome branches away from that of the chimp, there are many nucleotide
substitutions, but all are silent, i.e., they have no effect at all on the FOXP2 protein.
The even more numerous non-silent DNA mutations which must have taken place during
this period seem to have been rejected by natural selection because of the importance of
conserving the form of the protein. However, in the human line after the human-chimp
fork, something dramatic happens: There are only two base changes, but both of them
affect the protein! This circumstance suggests to Enard et al that the two alterations in
the human FOXP2 protein conferred a strong evolutionary advantage, and they speculate
that this advantage may have been an improved capacity for language.
Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA

Recent DNA studies have cast much light on human prehistory, and espe-
cially on the story of how a small group of anatomically and behaviorally
modern humans left Africa and populated the remainder of the world. Two
types of DNA have been especially useful — Y-chromosomal DNA and mi-
tochondrial DNA.
When we reproduce, the man’s sperm carries either an X chromosome
or a Y chromosome. It is almost equally probable which of the two it
carries. The waiting egg of the mother has an X chromosome with complete
certainty. When the sperm and egg unite to form a fertilized egg and later
an embryo, the YX combinations become boys while the XX combinations
become girls. Thus every male human carries a Y chromosome inherited
from his father, and in fact this chromosome exists in every cell of a male’s
body.
Humans have a total of 23 chromosomes, and most of these participate
in what might be called the “genetic lottery” — part of the remaining 22
chromosomes come from the father, and part from the mother, and it is
a matter of chance which parent contributes which chromosome. Because
of this genetic lottery, no two humans are genetically the same, except
in the case of identical twins. This diversity is a great advantage, not
only because it provides natural selection variation on which to act, but
also it because prevents parasites from mimicking our cell-surface antigens
and thus outwitting our immune systems. In fact the two advantages of
diversity just mentioned are so great that sexual reproduction is almost
universal among higher animals and plants.
Because of its special role in determining the sex of offspring, the Y
chromosome is exempted from participation in the genetic lottery. This
makes it an especially interesting object of study because the only changes
that occur in Y chromosomes as they are handed down between genera-
tions are mutations. These mutations are not only infrequent but they also
happen at a calculable rate. Thus by studying Y-chromosomal lineages,
researchers have been able not only to build up prehistoric family trees but
also to assign dates to events associated with the lineages.
A HSub-Saharan AfricaL
Y-Chromasomal Adam B HSub-Saharan AfricaL
M168 HTowards ExodusL
Fig. 6.2 The mutation M168 seems to have occurred just before the ancestral population
of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans left Africa, roughly 70,000 years ago.
All of the men who left Africa at that time carried this mutation. The descendents of
this small group, probably a single tribe, were destined to populate the entire world
outside Africa.
C
Outside Africa
M168
Exodus
F-R
Fig. 6.3 After M168, further mutations occurred, giving rise to the Y-chromosomal
groups C, D, E and F-R. Men carrying Y chromosomes of type C migrated to Central
Asia, East Asia and Australia/New Guinea. The D group settled in Central Asia, while
men carrying Y chromosomes of type E can be found today in East Asia, Sub-Saharan
Africa, the Middle East, West Eurasia, and Central Asia. Populations carrying Y chro-
mosomes of types F-R migrated to all parts of the world outside Africa. Those members
of population P who found their way to the Americas carried the mutation M242. Only
indigenous men of the Americas have Y chromosomes with M242.
Mitochondrial DNA is also exempted from participation in the ge-

netic lottery, but for a different reason. In Chapter 3, we mentioned
that mitochondria were once free-living eubacteria of a type called alpha-
proteobacteria. These free-living bacteria were able perform oxidative phos-
phorylation, i.e., they could couple the combustion of glucose to the for-
mation of the high-energy phosphate bond in ATP. When photosynthesis
L1a HSub-Sharan AfricaL
L1b HSub-Saharan AfricaL

Mitochondrial Eve
L2 HSub-Saharan AfricaL
L3 HTowards ExodusL
Fig. 6.4 Mitochondrial DNA is present in the bodies of both men and women, but
is handed on only from mother to daughter. The human family tree constructed from
mutations in mitochondrial DNA is closely parallel to the tree constructed by studying
Y chromosomes. In both trees we see that only a single small group left Africa, and
that the descendents of this small group populated the remainder of the world. The
mitochondrial groups L1a, L1b, and L2 are confined to Sub-Saharan Africa, but by
following the lineage L3 we see a path leading out of Africa towards the population of
the remainder of the world, as is shown in the next figure.
L3 HSub-Saharan AfricaL
L3 N HOutside AfricaL
Exodus
M HOutside AfricaL
Fig. 6.5 While the unmutated L3 lineage remained in Africa, a slightly changed group
of people found their way out. It seems to have been a surprisingly small group, perhaps
only a single tribe. Their descendents populated the remainder of the the world. The
branching between the N and M lineages occurred after their exodus from Africa. All
women in Western Eurasia are daughters of the N line, while in Eastern Eurasia women
are descended from both the N and M lineages. Daughters of both N and M reached the
Americas.
evolved, the earth’s atmosphere became rich in oxygen, which was a deadly
poison to most of the organisms alive at the time. Two billion years ago,
when atmospheric oxygen began to increase in earnest, many organisms
retreated into anaerobic ecological niches, while others became extinct; but
some survived the oxygen crisis by incorporating alpha-proteobacteria into
their cells and living with them symbiotically. Today, mitochondria living
as endosymbionts in all animal cells, use oxygen constructively to couple
the burning of food with the synthesis of ATP. As a relic of the time when
they were free-living bacteria, mitochondria have their own DNA, which is
contained within them rather than within the cell nuclei.
When a sperm and an egg combine, the sperm’s mitochondria are lost;
and therefore all of the mitochondria in the body of a human child come
from his or her mother. Just as Y-chromosomal DNA is passed essentially
unchanged between generations in the male lines of a family tree, mitochon-
drial DNA is passed on almost without change in the female lines. The only
changes in both cases are small and infrequent mutations. By estimating
the frequency of these mutations, researchers can assign approximate dates
to events in human prehistory.
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam

On the female side of the human family tree, all lines lead back to a single
woman, whom we might call “Mitochondrial Eve”. Similarly, all the lines
of the male family tree lead back to a single man, to whom we can give the
name “Y-Chromosomal Adam”. (“Eve” and “Adam” were not married,
however; they were not even contemporaries!)
But why do the female and male and family trees both lead back to
single individuals? This has to do with a phenomenon called “genetic drift”.
Sometimes a man will have no sons, and in that case, his male line will
end, thus reducing the total number of Y-chromosomes in the population.
Finally, after many generations, all Y-chromosomes will have dropped away
through the ending of male lines except those that can be traced back to a
single individual. Similar considerations hold for female lines.
When did Y-Chromosomal Adam walk the earth? Peter Underhill and
his colleagues at Stanford University calculate on the basis of DNA evi-
dence, that Adam lived between 40,000 and 140,000 years before the present
(BP). However, on the basis of other evidence (for example the dating of
archaeological sites in Australia) 40,000 years BP can be ruled out as being
much too recent. Similar calculations on the date of Mitochondrial Eve
find that she lived very approximately 150,000 years BP, but again there is
a wide error range.
Exodus: Out of Africa

A model for the events leading up to the exodus of fully modern humans
from Africa has been proposed by Sir Paul Mellars of Cambridge Univer-
sity, and it is shown in Table 6.3. In the article on which this table is
Table 6.3: Events leading up to the dispersal of fully modern humans

from Africa (a model proposed by Sir Paul Mellars).
Years before present Event
150,000–200,000 BP Initial emergence of anatomically modern

populations in Africa
110,000–90,000 BP Temporary dispersal of anatomically modern

populations (with Middle Paleolithic
technology) from Africa to southwest Asia,
associated with clear symbolic expression
80,000–70,000 BP Rapid climatic and environmental changes in

Africa
80,000–70,000 BP Major technological, economic and social

changes in south and east Africa
70,000–60,000 BP Major population expansion in Africa from

small source area
ca. 60,000 BP Dispersal of modern populations from Africa to

Eurasia
based, Mellars calls our attention to archaeological remains of anatomically

modern humans at the sites of Skhul and Qafzeh in what is now northern
Israel. The burials have been dated as having taken place 110,000–90,000
BP, and they show signs of cultural development, including ceremonial ar-
rangement with arms folded, and sacrificial objects such as pierced shell
ornaments. This early exodus was short-lived, however, probably because
of competition with the long-established Neanderthal populations in the
region.
In Mellars’ model, rapid climatic and environmental changes took place
in Africa during the period 80,000–70,000 BP. According to the Toba Catas-
trophe Theory3 the climatic changes in Mellers’ model were due to the
eruption of a supervolcano at the site of what is now Lake Toba in Indone-
sia. This eruption, one of the largest known to us, took place ca. 73,000
BP, and plunged the earth into a decade of extreme cold, during which the
population of our direct ancestors seem to have been reduced to a small
number, perhaps as few as 10,000 individuals4 .
The survivors of the Toba Catastrophe may have been selected for im-
proved linguistic ability, which gave them a more advanced culture than
their contemporaries. Mellers points to archaeological and genetic evidence
that a major population expansion of the L2 and L3 mitochondrial lineages
took place in Africa 70,000–60,000 BP, starting from a small source region
in East Africa, and spreading west and south. The expanding L2 and L3
populations were characterized by advanced cultural features such as upper
paleolithic technology, painting and body ornaments.
All researchers agree that it was a small group of the L3 mitochondrial
lineage that made the exodus from Africa ca. 70,000–60,000 BP, but there
is some disagreement about the date of this event. These differences reflect
the intrinsic inaccuracy of the genetic dating methods, but all experts in
the field agree that the group passing out of Africa was remarkably small,
especially when we reflect that the entire population of the remainder of
the world is descended from them.
The men in this tiny but brave group of explorers carried with them
the Y-chromosomal mutation M168, while the women were of the mito-
chondrial lineage L3. Shortly after they passed the Red Sea a mutation
occurred and two new mitochondrial lineages were established, M and N.
All women today in Western Eurasia are daughters of the N lineage5 , while
the M lineage spread to the entire world outside Africa. The mitochondrial
lineages M and N had further branches, and daughters of the A, B, C, D
and X lineages passed over a land bridge which linked Siberia to Alaska
during the period 22,000–7,000 BP, thus reaching the Americas.
In his excellent and fascinating book Before the Dawn, the science jour-
nalist Nicholas Wade discusses linguistic studies that support the early
3 The Toba Catastrophe Theory is supported by such authors as Ann Gibons, Michael
R. Rampino and Steven Self.

4 Additional support to the Toba Catastrophe Theory comes from DNA studies of mam-
mals, such as chimpanzees, orangutans, macques, cheetahs, tigers and gorillas. These
mammals also seem, on the basis of DNA studies, to have been reduced to very small
populations at the time of the Toba eruption.
5 Of course, this broad statement does not take into account the movements of peoples
that have taken place during historic times.
human migration scenarios that can be deduced from DNA research. The
work of the unconventional but visionary linguist Joseph Greenberg of Stan-
ford University is particularly interesting. While other linguists were con-
tent to demonstrate relationships between a few languages, such as those
in the Indo-European family, Greenberg attempted to arrange all known
languages into an enormous family tree. He published this work in the
1950’s, long before the DNA studies that we have just been discussing, but
because of what other linguists regarded as lack of rigor in his methods,
Greenberg’s prophetic voice was largely ignored by his peers. The linguist
Paul Newman recalls visiting the London School of Oriental and African
Studies ca. 1970. He was told that he could use the Common Room as
long has he promised never to mention the name of Joseph Greenberg. Fi-
nally, after Joseph Greenberg’s death, his visionary studies were vindicated
by DNA-based human migration scenarios, which agreed in surprising de-
tail with the great but neglected scholar’s linguistically-based story of how
early humans left their ancestral homeland in Africa and populated the
entire earth.
Acceleration of human cultural evolution

In the caves of Spain and southern France are the remains of vigorous
hunting cultures which flourished between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago.
The people of these upper paleolithic cultures lived on the abundant cold-
weather game which roamed the southern edge of the ice sheets during the
Wurm glacial period: huge herds of reindeer, horses and wild cattle, as
well as mammoths and wooly rhinos. The paintings found in the Dordogne
region of France, for example, combine decorative and representational ele-
ments in a manner which contemporary artists might envy. Here and there
among the paintings one can find stylized symbols which can be thought of
as the first steps towards writing.
In this period, not only painting, but also tool-making and weapon-
making were highly developed arts. For example, the Solutrian culture,
which flourished in Spain and southern France about 20,000 years ago,
produced beautifully worked stone lance points in the shape of laurel leaves
and willow leaves. The appeal of these exquisitely pressure-flaked blades
must have been aesthetic as well as functional. The people of the Solutrian
culture had fine bone needles with eyes, bone and ivory pendants, beads and
bracelets, and long bone pins with notches for arranging the hair. They
also had red, yellow and black pigments for painting their bodies. The
Solutrian culture lasted for 4,000 years. It ended in about 17,000 B.C.
when it was succeeded by the Magdalenian culture. Whether the Solutrian
people were conquered by another migrating group of hunters, or whether
they themselves developed the Magdalenian culture we do not know.
Beginning about 10,000 B.C., the way of life of the hunters was swept
aside by a great cultural revolution: the invention of agriculture. The earth
had entered a period of unusual climatic stability, and this may have helped
to make agriculture possible. The first agricultural villages date from this
time, as well as the earliest examples of pottery. Dogs and reindeer were
domesticated, and later, sheep and goats. Radio-carbon dating shows that
by 8,500 B.C., people living in the caves of Shanidar in the foothills of
the Zagros mountains in Iran had domesticated sheep. By 7,000 B.C.,
the village farming community at Jarmo in Iraq had domesticated goats,
together with barley and two different kinds of wheat.
Starting about 8000 B.C., rice came under cultivation in East Asia. This
may represent an independent invention of agriculture, and agriculture may
also have been invented independently in the western hemisphere, made
possible by the earth’s unusually stable climate during this period. At
Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley, excavations have revealed a prepottery
neolithic settlement surrounded by an impressive stone wall, six feet wide
and twelve feet high. Radiocarbon dating shows that the defenses of the
town were built about 7,000 B.C. Probably they represent the attempts of
a settled agricultural people to defend themselves from the plundering raids
of less advanced nomadic tribes.
Starting in western Asia, the neolithic agricultural revolution swept
westward into Europe, and eastward into the regions that are now Iran
and India. By 4,300 B.C., the agricultural revolution had spread south-
west to the Nile valley, where excavations along the shore of Lake Fayum
have revealed the remains of grain bins and silos. The Nile carried farming
and stock-breeding techniques slowly southward, and wherever they ar-
rived, they swept away the hunting and food-gathering cultures. By 3,200
B.C. the agricultural revolution had reached the Hyrax Hill site in Kenya.
At this point the southward movement of agriculture was stopped by the
swamps at the headwaters of the Nile. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Sea
and the Danube carried the revolution westward into Europe. Between
4,500 and 2,000 B.C. it spread across Europe as far as the British Isles and
Scandinavia.
Early forms of writing

In Mesopotamia (which in Greek means “between the rivers”), the settled
agricultural people of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys evolved a form of
writing. The practical Mesopotamians seem to have invented writing as a
means of keeping accounts.
Small clay and pebble counting tokens symbolizing items of trade began
to be used in the Middle East about 9000 B.C., and they were widely used
in the region until 1500 B.C. These tokens had various shapes, depending
on the ware which they symbolized, and when made of clay they were
often marked with parallel lines or crosses, which made their meaning more
precise. In all, about 500 types of tokens have been found at various sites.
Their use extended as far to the west as Khartoum in present-day Sudan,
and as far to the east as the region which is now Pakistan. Often the tokens
were kept in clay containers which were marked to indicate their contents.
The markings on the containers, and the tokens themselves, evolved into
true writing.
Among the earliest Mesopotamian writings are a set of clay tablets
found at Tepe Yahya in southern Iran, the site of an ancient Elamite trading
community halfway between Mesopotamia and India. The Elamite trade
supplied the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia with silver, copper, tin,
lead, precious gems, horses, timber, obsidian, alabaster and soapstone. The
tablets found at Tepe Yahya are inscribed in proto-Elamite, and radiocar-
bon dating of organic remains associated with the tablets shows them to
be from about 3,600 B.C. The inscriptions on these tablets were made by
pressing the blunt and sharp ends of a stylus into soft clay. Similar tablets
have been found at the Sumerian city of Susa at the head of the Tigris
River.
In about 3,100 B.C. the cuneiform script was developed, and later
Mesopotamian tablets are written in cuneiform, a phonetic script in which
the symbols stand for syllables.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing) system began its develop-
ment in about 4,000 B.C. At that time, it was pictorial rather than phonetic.
However, the Egyptians were in contact with the Sumerian civilization of
Mesopotamia, and when the Sumerians developed a phonetic system of
writing in about 3,100 B.C., the Egyptians were quick to adopt the idea.
In the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, a character stood for a syllable.
In the Egyptian adaptation of this idea, some of the symbols stood for syl-
lables or numbers, or were determinative symbols, which helped to make
the meaning of a word more precise. However, some of the hieroglyphs were
purely alphabetic, i.e. they stood for sounds which we would now repre-
sent by a single letter. This was important from the standpoint of cultural
history, since it suggested to the Phoenicians the idea of an alphabet of the
modern type.
In Sumer, the pictorial quality of the symbols was lost at a very early
stage, so that in the cuneiform script the symbols are completely abstract.
By contrast, the Egyptian system of writing was designed to decorate mon-
uments and to be impressive even to an illiterate viewer; and this purpose
was best served by retaining the elaborate pictographic form of the symbols.
Besides the impressive and beautiful hieroglyphic writing which decorated
their monuments, the Egyptians used a more rapidly-written script called
Hieratic, which also existed in a shorthand version called Demotic (the
“people’s script”). During the Ptolemaic period6 the Coptic language was
spoken by part of the population of Egypt. This language was closely re-
lated to Egyptian, but was written using the Greek alphabet, an alphabet
which developed from that of the Phoenicians. Knowledge of Coptic was
one of the keys which helped Egyptologists to decipher the Rosetta stone,
and hence the hieroglyphs7 .
Starting with the neolithic agricultural revolution and the invention of
writing, human culture began to develop with explosive speed. Agriculture
led to a settled way of life, with leisure for manufacturing complex arti-
facts, and for invention and experimentation. Writing allowed the cultural
achievements of individuals or small groups to become widespread, and to
be passed efficiently from one generation to the next.
Compared with the rate of ordinary genetic evolution, the speed with
which the information-driven cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens
began to develop is truly astonishing. 12,000 years before the present, our
ancestors were decorating the walls of their caves with drawings of mam-
moths. Only 10,000 years later, they were speculating about the existence
of atoms! New methods for the conservation and utilization of informa-
tion were the driving forces behind the explosively accelerating evolution
6 The first ruler in the Ptolomeic dynasty was one of the generals of Alexander the
Great. The last in the line was the famous queen, Cleopatra, a contemporary (and
lover) of Julius Caesar.
7 It was the English physician, physicist and egyptologist Thomas Young who first
argued that ancient Egyptian might be similar to Coptic. He was the first to decipher the
Demotic script on the Rosetta stone, and he later compiled the first dictionary of Demotic
Egyptian. He thus laid the foundation for Champollion’s decoding of hieroglyphics in
1823.
of human culture.
This remarkably rapid growth of human culture was not accompanied
by very great genetic changes in our species. It took place instead because
of a revolutionary leap in the efficiency with which information could be
conserved and transmitted between generations, not in the code of DNA,
but in the codes of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chi-
nese ideograms, Mayan glyphs, and the Phoenecian and Greek alphabets.
Fig. 6.6 Starting with the neolithic agricultural revolution and the invention of writing,
human culture began to develop with explosive speed. This figure shows the estimated
human population as a function of time during the last 4,000 years. The dots are
population estimates in billions, while the solid curve is the hyperbola p = c/(2020 –
y), where p is the global human population y is the year, and c = 234000. The curve
reflects an explosively accelerating accumulation of information. Culturally transmitted
techniques of agriculture allowed a much greater density of population than was possible
for hunter-gatherers. The growth of population was further accelerated by the invention
of printing and by the industrial and scientific developments which followed from this
invention.
The invention of paper, ink, and printing

The ancient Egyptians were the first to make books. As early as 4,000
B.C., they began to make books in the form of scrolls by cutting papyrus
reeds into thin strips and pasting them into sheets of double thickness. The
sheets were glued together end to end, so that they formed a long roll. The
rolls were sometimes very long indeed. For example, one roll, which is now
in the British Museum, is 37 centimeters wide and 41 meters long.
The world’s first great public library was established in Alexandria,
Egypt, at the start of the Hellenistic Era (323 B.C. – 146 B.C.). Ptolemy I,
who ruled Egypt after the dissolution of the empire of Alexander of Mace-
don, built a great library for the preservation of important manuscripts.
The library at Alexandria was open to the general public, and at its
height it was said to contain 750,000 volumes. Besides preserving impor-
tant manuscripts, the library became a center for copying and distributing
books.8
The material which the Alexandrian scribes used for making books was
papyrus, which was relatively inexpensive. The Ptolemys were anxious
that Egypt should keep its near-monopoly on book production, and they
refused to permit the export of papyrus. Pergamum, a rival Hellenistic
city in Asia Minor, also boasted a library second in size only to the great
library at Alexandria. The scribes at Pergamum, unable to obtain papyrus
from Egypt, tried to improve the preparation of the skins traditionally
used for writing in Asia. The resulting material was called Membranum
pergamentum, and in English, this name has become “parchment”.
Paper of the type which we use today was not invented until 105 A.D.
According to tradition, this enormously important invention was made by
a Chinese eunuch named Tsai Lun. The kind of paper invented by Tsai
Lun could be made from many things - for example, bark, hemp, rags, etc.
The starting material was made into a pulp, mixed together with water
and binder, spread out on a cloth to partially dry, and finally heated and
pressed into thin sheets.
The Chinese later made another invention of immense importance to
the cultural evolution of mankind. This was the invention of printing.
Together with writing, printing is one of the key inventions which form
the basis of human cultural evolution. The exact date of the invention of
8Unfortunately this great library was destroyed. Much damage was done in 145 B.C.
by riots and civil war. According to some accounts, the destruction was completed in 47
B.C. when Julius Caesar’s fleet set fire to the Egyptian fleet, and the fire spread to the
city of Alexandria.
woodblock printing is uncertain, but indirect evidence makes it seem likely

that the technique was first used in the Sui dynasty (581 A.D. – 618 A.D.).
Woodblock printing became popular during the T’ang period (618 A.D. –
906 A.D.), and it was much used by Buddhist monks who were interested
in producing many copies of the sacred texts which they had translated
from Sanskrit. The act of reproducing prayers was also considered to be
meritorious by the Buddhists.
Chinese administrators had for a long time followed the custom of brush-
ing engraved official seals with ink and using them to stamp documents.
The type of ink which they used was made from lampblack, water and
binder. In fact, it was what we now call “India ink”. However, in spite of
its name, India ink is a Chinese invention, which later spread to India and
from there to Europe.
We mentioned that paper of the type which we now use was invented in
China in the first century A.D. Thus, the Buddhist monks of China had all
the elements which they needed to make printing practical: They had good
ink, cheap, smooth paper, and the tradition of stamping documents with
ink-covered engraved seals. The first surviving block prints which they
produced date from the 8th century A.D. They were made by carving a
block of wood the size of a printed page so that raised characters remained,
brushing ink onto the block, and pressing this onto a sheet of paper.
The oldest known printed book, the “Diamond Sutra”, is dated 868
A.D., and it consists of only six printed pages. It was discovered in 1907
by an English scholar who obtained permission from Buddhist monks in
Chinese Turkestan to open some walled-up monastery rooms, which were
said to have been sealed for 900 years. The rooms were found to contain a
library of about 15,000 manuscripts, among which was the Diamond Sutra.
Block printing spread quickly throughout China, and also reached Japan,
where woodblock printing ultimately reached great heights in the work of
such artists as Hiroshige and Hokusai.
The invention of block printing during the T’ang dynasty had an enor-
mously stimulating effect on literature, and the T’ang period is regarded
as the golden age of Chinese lyric poetry. A collection of T’ang poetry,
compiled in the 18th century, contains 48,900 poems by more than 2,000
poets.
About 1041–1048 A.D., a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng invented
movable type, made from a mixture of clay and glue, and hardened by
baking. He assembled the type into a text on an iron tray covered with
a mixture of resin, wax and paper ash. He then gently heated the tray,
and allowed it to cool, so that the type became firmly fixed in place. After
printing as many copies of the text as he desired, Pi Sheng reheated the
iron tray and reused the characters.
In 1313, a Chinese magistrate named Wang Chen initiated a large-scale
printing project using movable type. He is said to have ordered craftsmen
to carve 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks. These were used to
print a book on the history of technology. However, in spite of the efforts
of Pi Sheng and Wang Chen, movable type never became very popular in
China, because the Chinese written language contains 10,000 characters.
However, printing with movable type was highly successful in Korea as
early as the 15th century A.D., perhaps because a phonetic writing system
existed in Korea, with symbols for syllables.
The unsuitability of the Chinese written language for the use of movable
type was one of the greatest tragedies of Chinese civilization. Writing had
been developed at a very early stage in Chinese history, but the system
remained a pictographic system, with a different character for each word.
A phonetic system of writing was never developed.
The failure to develop a phonetic system of writing had its roots in the
Chinese imperial system of government. The Chinese empire formed a vast
area in which many different languages were spoken. It was necessary to
have a universal language of some kind in order to govern such an empire.
The Chinese written language solved this problem admirably.
Suppose that the emperor sent identical letters to two officials in dif-
ferent districts. Reading the letters aloud, the officials might use entirely
different words, although the characters in the letters were the same. Thus
the Chinese written language was a sort of “Esperanto” which allowed com-
munication between various language groups, and its usefulness as such
prevented its replacement by a phonetic system.
The disadvantages of the Chinese system of writing were twofold: First,
it was difficult to learn to read and write, and therefore literacy was confined
to a small social class whose members could afford a prolonged education.
The system of civil-service examinations made participation in the govern-
ment dependent on a high degree of literacy, and hence the old, established
scholar-gentry families maintained a long-term monopoly on power, wealth
and education. Social mobility was possible in theory, since the civil service
examinations were open to all, but in practice it was nearly unattainable.
The second great disadvantage of the Chinese system of writing was
that it was unsuitable for printing with movable type. An “information
explosion” occurred in the West following the introduction of printing with
movable type, but this never occurred in China. It is ironical that although
both paper and printing were invented by the Chinese, the full effect of these
immensely important inventions bypassed China and instead revolutionized
the west.
The information explosion

Like the process of silk manufacture, the art of papermaking remained for a
long time a Chinese secret, but paper made in China (like silk) was traded
with the Arab world along caravan routes. Finally, in 751, Chinese pris-
oners taken at the battle of Talas, near Samarkand, revealed the secret of
papermaking to the Arabs. Between the 8th century and the 13th century,
paper was extensively manufactured and used throughout the Islamic world,
which stretched from the Middle East through North Africa to Spain. It
seems strange that Chinese techniques of printing were not also transmit-
ted during this period to the highly advanced Islamic civilization. Some
historians believe that methods of printing were known to the Arabs in the
8th-13th centuries, but for religious reasons not used, the Koran being con-
sidered too holy to be reproduced by mechanical means. A further factor
may have been the fact that the highly decorative classical Arabic script
was not very well adapted to printing with movable type. Even in modern,
simplified Arabic, each letter has many forms, whose use depends on the
position in the word and on the neighboring letters.
Much of the knowledge achieved by the ancient civilizations of western
Asia and the Mediterranean regions had been lost with the destruction
of the great library of Alexandria. However, a few of the books of the
classical and Hellenistic authors had survived in the eastern part of the
Roman Empire at Byzantium.
The Byzantine empire included many Syriac-speaking subjects; and in
fact, beginning in the 3rd century A.D., Syriac replaced Greek as the major
language of western Asia. In the 5th century, there was a split in the
Christian church of Byzantium, and the Nestorian church separated from
the official Byzantine church. The Nestorians were bitterly persecuted,
and therefore they migrated, first to Mesopotamia, and later to southwest
Persia.
During the early Middle Ages, the Nestorian capital of Gondasapur
was a great center of intellectual activity. The works of Plato, Aristotle,
Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Hero and Galen were translated
into Syriac by Nestorian scholars, who had brought these books with them
from Byzantium.
Among the most distinguished of the Nestorian translators were mem-
bers of a family called Bukht-Yishu (meaning “Jesus hath delivered”),
which produced seven generations of outstanding scholars. Members of
this family were fluent not only in Greek and Syriac, but also in Arabic
and Persian . In the 7th century, the Islamic religion suddenly emerged as
a conquering and proselytizing force. The Arabs and their converts quickly
conquered western Asia, northern Africa and Spain. After a short initial
period of fanaticism which was often hostile to learning, the attitude of
the Islamic conquerers changed to an appreciation of ancient cultures; and
during the middle ages, the Islamic world reached a very high level of civi-
lization9 . Thus, while the century from 750 to 850 was primarily a period
of translation from Greek into Syriac, the century from 850 to 950 was a
period of translation from Syriac to Arabic.
The skill of the physicians of the Bukht-Yishu family convinced the
Caliphs of Baghdad of the value of Greek learning, and in this way the
family played an important role in the preservation of the classical cultures.
Soon Baghdad replaced Gondasapur as a center of learning and translation.
Islamic scholars not only preserved our heritage from the ancient clas-
sical cultures but also added much to it. Chemistry, medicine, physics,
astronomy and mathematics all owe much to the highly cultured Islamic
world of the Middle Ages. The magnitude of this contribution can be judged
from the many modern scientific words which have an Arabic origin. For
example, the English words for chemistry is derived from the Arabic word
“al-chimia”, meaning “the changing”. The word “al-kali”, which appears in
the writings of the Persian chemist Rahzes (860–950), means “the calcined”
in Arabic. It is the source of our word “alkali” as well as of the symbol K
for potassium. In mathematics, one of the most outstanding Arabic writers
was al-Khwarizmi (780–850). The title of his book, Ilm al-jabr wa’d muqa-
balah, is the source of the English word “algebra”. In Arabic, “al-jabr”
means “the equating”. Al-Khwarizmi’s name has also become an English
word, “algorism”, the old word for arithmetic.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, Europe began to be influenced by
the advanced Islamic civilization. European scholars were anxious to learn,
but there was an “iron curtain” of religious intolerance which made travel in
the Islamic countries difficult and dangerous for Christians. However, in the
12th century, parts of Spain, including the city of Toledo, were reconquered
9 There were, however, oscillations between periods of liberal fostering of intellectual
efforts, and periods of puritanical suppression.
by the Christians. Toledo had been an Islamic cultural center, and many
Moslem and Jewish scholars, together with their manuscripts, remained in
the city when it passed into Christian hands. Thus Toledo became a center
for the exchange of ideas between east and west; and it was in this city that
many of the books of the classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers were
translated from Arabic into Latin.10
Another bridge between east and west was established by the Crusades.
Crusaders returning from the Middle East brought paper with them to
Europe, and from 1275 onwards the manufacture of paper became com-
mon in Italy, contributing importantly to the Italian Renaissance. In the
14th century, the manufacture of paper spread to France and Germany.
Woodblock printing came into use in Europe during the last quarter of the
14th century. When the use of paper became common, it was noticed that
the smooth and absorbent surface of paper was much more suitable for
receiving a printed impression than was the surface of parchment, besides
being far less expensive. In the 15th century, European artists such as Al-
brecht Dürer began to produce woodblock prints of great beauty. At the
same time, woodblock printing was used to produce small books with a few
pages of script, for example religious works and Latin grammars. Some ex-
periments with movable wooden type seem to have been made in Holland,
but the results were disappointing because when the letters were made as
small as was desirable, they were not sufficiently durable.
Starting in approximately 1430, European craftsmen from the medieval
guilds, who had a knowledge of the use of metal dies, began to apply this
technique to printing. In the first step of this process, a set of dies, one
for each letter of the alphabet, was engraved in brass or bronze. The dies
were then used to produce a mold, over which lead was poured. When
the lead plate was removed from the mold, the letters stood out in raised
form. This method of metallographic printing was used in Holland and in
the Rhineland, and in the period 1434–1439, Johannes Gutenberg used it
in what is now Strasbourg France.
Gutenberg is generally credited with the simultaneous development (in
1450) of movable metal type and the printing press. He was a silversmith
whose knowledge of metallurgy was undoubtedly useful to him when he
10 Very often, the train of translations was very indirect, e.g., from Greek to Arabic to
Hebrew to Spanish to Latin. For this reason, some of the earliest classical Greek texts
made available to the Christian world were very incomplete. Added to this was the fact
that translators and scribes felt quite free to edit, amend, and add to the texts on which
they were working.
designed the machinery and type for printing. His partner in the book-
producing enterprise was a businessman named Johann Fust. In 1509,
there was a lawsuit in which Fust’s grandson, Johann Schoffer, claimed
that Fust alone was the inventor of the new printing method. However,
in 1505, Schoffer had already written in a preface to an edition of Livy,
“...the admirable art of typography was invented by the ingenious Johan
Gutenberg at Mainz in 1450”. One is more inclined to believe Schoffer’s
statement of 1505 than his later testimony in the 1509 lawsuit, which seems
to have been motivated by the hope of financial gain.
The printing press invented by Gutenberg was a modification of the
press which already used in Europe for binding books. The bed was fixed,
and the movable upper platen (or level surface) was driven by a bar attached
to a worm screw. The type letters were cast by pouring a molten alloy of
lead, tin and antimony into moulds produced from dies. The letters were
arranged into lines of type on wooden composing sticks held in the hand
of the typographer, and each line was then justified (i.e., all the lines were
made to have equal length) by the insertion of small blank lead spacers.
After the printing of a page, each line was taken to pieces by hand, and the
letters were returned to their containers.
Paper alone had an enormously stimulating effect on European culture
when its manufacture and use became common at the end of the 13th cen-
tury; but when paper was combined with Gutenberg’s improved printing
techniques in the 15th century, the combination produced an explosive accu-
mulation of information. The combination of paper and improved printing
resulted in the scientific and industrial revolutions, and in short the modern
world.
One must add that it was not only paper and printing which combined
to produce the information explosion, but also fragments from the writings
of the classical ancient civilizations which had been translated first into
Syriac, then from Syriac into Arabic, and finally from Arabic into Latin,
and which thus, by a roundabout route, drifted into the consciousness of
the west.
The career of Leonardo da Vinci illustrates the first phase of the infor-
mation explosion: Inexpensive paper was being manufactured in Europe,
and it formed the medium for Leonardo’s thousands of pages of notes. His
notes and sketches would never have been possible if he had been forced to
use expensive parchment as a medium. On the other hand, the full force
of Leonardo’s genius and diligence was never felt because his notes were
not printed. (In fact, fearing persecution for his radical ideas, Leonardo
kept his notebooks secret.) Copernicus, who was a younger contemporary

of Leonardo, had a much greater effect on the history of ideas because his
work was published. Thus while paper alone made a large contribution to
the information explosion, it was printing combined with paper which had
an absolutely decisive and revolutionary impact: The modern scientific era
began with the introduction of printing.
The development of printing in Europe and the rapid spread of books
and knowledge produced a brilliant chainlike series of scientific discoveries
— the sun-centered system of Copernicus, Kepler’s three laws of plane-
tary motion, Descartes’ invention of analytic geometry, Gilbert’s studies
of magnetism, Galileo’s discoveries in experimental physics and astronomy,
the microscopy of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek, Newton’s universal laws of mo-
tion and gravitation, the differential and integral calculus of Newton and
Leibniz, the medical discoveries of Harvey, Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, Sem-
melweis and Lister, and the chemical discoveries of Boyle, Dalton, Priestly,
Lavoisier and Berzelius.
The rapid accumulation of scientific knowledge made possible by pa-
per and printing was quickly converted into the practical inventions of the
industrial revolution. In the space of a few centuries, the information ex-
plosion changed Europe from a backward region into a society of an entirely
new type, driven by scientific and technological innovation and by the dif-
fusion and accumulation of knowledge.
Information-driven human cultural evolution as part of

biological evolution
In thinking about human cultural evolution, one has a tendency to put
it into a compartment by itself, separated from the evolution of microor-
ganisms, animals, and plants. We feel that culture is not a subject for
biologists but rather the domain of humanists. There is indeed a sharp
qualitative discontinuity which marks the change from information transfer
through the medium of DNA, RNA and proteins, to information transfer
and accumulation through the medium of the spoken, written and printed
word. Nevertheless it is important to remember that our species is a part
of the biosphere, and that all our activities are fundamentally biological
phenomena.
In Chapter 1, we discussed the ideas of Condorcet, one of the pioneers of
evolutionary thought. He regarded genetic evolution (the process by which
humans evolved from lower animals) and cultural evolution (the process by
which civilized humans evolved from primitive man) as being two parts of a
larger phenomenon which he called “progress”. Although cultural evolution
seems to differ qualitatively from genetic evolution, Condorcet regarded the
two as being aspects of the same overall process.
Sharp qualitative discontinuities have occurred several times before dur-
ing the earth’s 4-billion year evolutionary history: A dramatic change oc-
curred when autocatalytic systems first became surrounded by a cell mem-
brane. Another sharp transition occurred when photosynthesis evolved, and
a third when the enormously more complex eukaryotic cells developed from
the prokaryotes. The evolution of multicellular organisms also represents a
sharp qualitative change. Undoubtedly the change from molecular informa-
tion transfer to cultural information transfer is an even more dramatic shift
to a higher mode of evolution than the four sudden evolutionary gear-shifts
just mentioned. Human cultural evolution began only an instant ago on
the time-scale of genetic evolution. Already it has completely changed the
planet. We have no idea where it will lead.
Suggestions for further reading

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CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND

The coevolution of human language, culture, and intelligence

120 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

would be most likely in Africa, the home of chimpanzees and gorillas, or

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 121

Table 6.1: Hominid species

Genus and species Years before present Brain volume

Ardipithicus ramidus 5.8 to 4.4 million

Australopithecus anamensis 4.2 to 3.9 million

Australopithecus afarensis 3.9 to 3.0 million 375 to 550 cm3

Australopithecus africanus 3 to 2 million 420 to 500 cm3

Australopithecus aethiopicus 2.6 to 2.3 million 410 cm3

Australopithecus robustus 2 to 1.5 million 530 cm3

Australopithecus boisei 2.1 to 1.1 million 530 cm3

Homo habilis 2.4 to 1.5 million 500 to 800 cm3

Homo erectus 1.8 to 0.3 million 750 to 1225 cm3

Homo sapiens (archaic) 0.5 to 0.2 million 1200 cm3

Homo sapiens neand. 0.23 to 0.03 million 1450 cm3

Homo sapiens sapiens 0.12 mil. to present 1350 cm3

boisei11 represent a sidebranch which finally died out. “Pithecanthropus

122 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

Table 6.2: Paleolithic cultures

Name Years before present Characteristics

Oldowan 2.4 to 1.5 million Africa, flaked pebble tools

Choukoutien 1.2 to 0.5 million chopper tool culture of east Asia

Abbevillian 500,000 to 450,000 crude stone handaxes

Africa, Europe, northeast Asia

Mousterian 70,000 to 20,000 produced by Neanderthal man,

retouched core and flake tools,

wooden spears, fire, burial of dead

Aurignacian 50,000 to 20,000 western Europe, fine stone blades,

pins and awls of bone, fire, cave art

Solutrian 20,000 to 17,000 France and central Europe,

long, pressure-flaked bifacial blades

Magdalenian 17,000 to 10,000 western Europe, reindeer hunting

awls and needles of bone and antler

discovered near Laetoli in Tanzania. The Laetoli footprints are believed to

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 123

name (meaning “handy man”) to their discovery in order to call special

124 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

They changed from a vegetarian diet to an omnivorous one, becoming

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 125

immediately after birth, a human baby’s development is almost ludicrously

126 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 127

Y-Chromasomal Adam B HSub-Saharan AfricaL

M168 HTowards ExodusL

Mitochondrial DNA is also exempted from participation in the ge-

128 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

L1a HSub-Sharan AfricaL

L1b HSub-Saharan AfricaL

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION 129

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam

Exodus: Out of Africa

130 INFORMATION THEORY AND EVOLUTION

Table 6.3: Events leading up to the dispersal of fully modern humans

Years before present Event