Talk by Paul and Joanne at the Spring 2011 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Sacramento, California. This talk reviews the archaeology of coercive technology in native North America and its relationship to the evolution of social complexity and revolutionary social change. As discussed in Chapter 12 of Death from a Distance, North American archaeology is one of the richest and most important sources of data to test any theory of history and our theory is extremely powerful in the predictions it makes about what should be found by archaeologists.

Paul and Joanne gave a lecture in the National Science Foundation funded series hosted by the Evolutionary Studies program at SUNY New Paltz on April 11, 2011. This talk is a broad introduction to the power of our fundamental theory to explain human origins, properties and history. We review the fundamental theory and its accounts of the fossil record of human emergence, the origin of the uniquely powerful human mind, and the diverse transitions of the historical record, including the behaviorally modern human revolution, the agricultural revolutions and the rise of the modern state. See webcast, with slides

This week’s publication of the first draft and initial analysis of the Neandertal genome sequence by a large multi-national group is of very special interest. [May 7, 2010, Science]

Our theory makes a very strong prediction about the ascendency of the behaviorally modern humans that are ancestral to all of us alive today (Chapter 11 in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe or DfaD). Our specific claim is that the behaviorally modern human revolution was a social revolution, not a genetic revolution. One of the symptoms of this dramatic process was that the populations of our modern ancestors began to grow and expand out of Africa, thereby driving all other non-modern humans, including the Neandertals of Eurasia, to apparent extinction. Thus, our theory implies that the behaviorally modern displacement of Neandertals was unlikely to reflect some genetic superiority of our “modern” ancestors over other human groups, like Neandertals, traditionally classified as “archaic.” (more…)