Communities Matter: The Evolutionary Reason
Decatur Metro | June 5, 2009From NPR News…
Anthropologists have come up with a theory about what kicked off a series of “creative explosions” in human ingenuity during the Stone Age – from about 90,000 to 45,000 years ago – and it doesn’t involve some sudden improvement in brain power.
Instead, the flowering of intelligence that brought sophisticated tools, better weapons and art came about because of population density: More people started living in bigger communities.
That’s the conclusion, described in the current issue of the journal Science, of a group of scientists at University College London. It’s not the first time anthropologists have suggested that intellectual power arose from numbers, not biology. But the British scientists have created a mathematical model that, along with archaeological evidence, shows how inventions might have proliferated faster and more permanently once large communities of hunter-gatherers formed.
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I get the feelin’ that if one were reading this article for an undergraduate of high school history class, there’d be that one student to mutter under his/her breath, “well duuuhhhh.”
^_^
Re-posting Philip Michaels’ comments from the NPR site because they are my exact thoughts:
It’s great to see research begin to validate Jane Jacobs’ ideas about how cities fit into our lives. She used the work of historians and archeologists to show that cities are the basis of our economic advancement. Apparently, we did not rise out of some self-sufficient pastoral ideal, instead our advances came from cooperatively solving problems in diverse urban environments. Imagine what an affect (sic) that notion would have on many of our current public policy debates.
Amen. As yourself: WWJJD? (What would Jane Jacobs Do?)
I would turn WWJJD into a bumper sticker, but that would be highly ironic.