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the cognitive changes that took place around 50,000 years ago enabled humans to create and believe in stories

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this helped them organize themselves in groups much larger than 150

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humans used their imagination not only to adapt themselves to the world as it is, but to create new worlds

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what was physical, cognitive, and spiritual life like for people 40,000 years ago?

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the vast majority of people like us who had our full cognitive abilities, lived as hunters and gatherers: the lifestyles of peasant, shepherd, office worker, factory worker, all appear extremely late in the human history

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evolutionary psychology

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not only the body but also the mind is shaped by evolutionary pressures

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an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective

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evolution psychology is not simply a sub-discipline of psychology but can provide a foundational framework that integrates the entire field of psychology, in the same way it has for biology

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eating habits

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the way that we eat is shaped by the conditions of our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago

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the problem of obesity

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Throughout ancient human history, if a woman was walking along the Savanna and saw a tree full of fruit, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many fruits in as short of time as possible since they were rare and there was competition for this food. In this way, people who had the physical propensity to want to eat as many sweet things as possible had a better chance of surviving and passing their genes onto their offspring. Today, when you open the door of your refrigerator and see a chocolate cake, although it may not be healthy for you, you are unfortunately wired to eat as much of this cake in as short of time as possible. Your genes have not yet caught up to the fact that you are living in an affluent society in the 21st century.

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sexual, romantic and family habits of humans living 40,000 years ago

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what kinds of habits did they have?

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likely that they lived in communes

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people knew the other people in their band than people today know their spouses

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e.g. they got to see how members of their bands reacted in extreme conditions, e.g. during a mammoth hunt or in a lion attack

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parenthood may have been very different, children raised not by couples but by the whole tribe

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fatherhood may have been very different since it may be difficult in some communes to know who the father was

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some known tribes have a concept of collective fatherhood, they believed that a child is nourished by the sperm of more than one man

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we forget that before the 19th century there was little evidence what was happening at the egg/sperm level since modern medicine was not developed to that point yet

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some say that there were typically nuclear families within communes

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unfortunately there is little evidence of how people lived 40,000 years ago in terms of family relationships, since there is no written record

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ancient hunter/gatherer communities probably varied quite widely from each other

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thanks to the ability of fictive language and the ability to create imagined realities which can manifest themselves in largely different norms and values, the most obvious of example of this are different languages, religions, beliefs, and values existing in a small area

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the debates about what was the natural way of life of homo sapiens misses the main points. The main point is that ever since the cognitive revolution, there hasn't been a single, natural way of life for Homo sapiens. There have been rather many cultural choices from among a very wide spectrum of possibilities.