Monday, June 23, 2025

Niche dispersal

As we're (well, HBDChick was, some days ago) talking about Early Man: Emily Y. Hallett et al. This deals with "human niche" versus the north and east African habitat-types.

This paper notes that we humans - and Denisovan humans - were already capable of symbolic language through tool specialisation in "MIS 5", which "5e" includes the close of the Eemian 120ka+. But we hadn't used these tools to get far into the Sahara, nor into the jungles. After the Eemian, the climate reverted Pleistocene.

Say they: the human niche progressively expanded to include more habitat types beginning around 70 ka and that this expansion peaked at about 50 ka. 70 ka will be when Takarkori.

So if we could do symbolism and we could live in various environments... what took so long? They seem to be arguing for a "critical mass" of bare human numbers. Tribes of thirty couldn't outdo the wilderness. Tribes of three hundred, could.

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