The Sapient Paradox

From The Sapient Paradox As An Ancient Analog to the Fermi Paradox, And the Great Trap of Prehistory it Implies by Scott Alexander.

Almost everything we’ve talked about so far, with the exception of the mammoth houses and some remains of gathering places, takes place after 10,000 BC. It’s really only in the Upper Paleolithic (12,000-5,000 BC) that there is any good evidence for what we would call civilization, with its associated lavish burials and monumental centers of ritual congregation and pilgrimage and trade networks and specialization of tribes toward certain industries, and it is only at this point that complex representation in art becomes essentially universal.

What was happening before then? Isn’t that the question we’re most interested in? The primal state of human nature? The vast majority of the Davids’ evidence throughout The Dawn of Everything comes from post-10,000 BC societies. And this is a problem, since even the Davids admit in the book that humans have been around for between 100,000 to 200,000 years.

This is a striking mismatch: let’s say modern humans genetically (mostly) and physically (definitely) were around 100,000 years ago: why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe? This perplexing question is called the “Sapient Paradox.” Colin Renfrew, the coiner of the Sapient Paradox, describes it as a

puzzling aspect, which I call the Sapient Paradox. . . we can see in the archeological record. . . the appearance of our own species, Homo Sapiens, about 100 or 150,000 thousand years ago in Africa, and we can follow the out-of-Africa migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, 60-70,000 years ago. . . Apart from the episode of cave art, which was very much limited to Europe and a bit further on to Asia, not a great deal happened until about 10,000 years ago. . . modern genetics has made clear that our genetic composition, speaking in general. . . is very similar to the genetic composition to our ancestors in Africa of about 70,000 years ago.

So, Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway), go back 200,000 years, possibly having language all that time. And who knows, human-level cognitive abilities might even go back further than that—our cousins (and ancestors) the Neanderthals wouldn’t look very out of place on the subway either, perhaps prehistorical minds were similarly similar.

In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. Depending on your politics, the Great Trap might be an oppressive patriarchy, or perhaps a decadent matriarchy, or a lazy commune, etc (e.g., Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap” of mutual warfare between tribes—although he does not connect this to the Sapient Paradox).