During the ~500,000 years that Neanderthals were around, their stone- tool-making technology didn’t advance at all: tools from half-a-million years apart are functionally identical. Clearly their capacity for cultural transmission of stone-tool-making skills was already at its capacity limit the whole time.
During the ~300,000 years that Homo sapiens has been around, our technology has advanced at an accelerating rate, with a rate-of-advance roughly proportion to planetary population, and planetary population increasing with technological advances, with the positive feedback giving super-exponential acceleration. Clearly our cultural transmission of technological skills has never saturated its capacity limit (and information technology such as writing, printing, and the Internet has obviously further increased that limit).
So there’s a clear and dramatic difference here, and it seems to date back to around the start of our species. Just what caused such a massive increase in our species’ capacity to pass on useful information between generations is unclear. (Personally I suspect something in syntactic generality of our language, perhaps loosely analogous to the phenomenon of Turing-completeness.) But Homo sapiens is not just another hominid, and the sapiens part isn’t just puffery: we have a dramatic capability shift from any previous species in the bandwidth of our cultural information transmission — it’s vastly larger than the information content of our genome, and still growing.
It’s a well-know fact in anthropology that:
During the ~500,000 years that Neanderthals were around, their stone- tool-making technology didn’t advance at all: tools from half-a-million years apart are functionally identical. Clearly their capacity for cultural transmission of stone-tool-making skills was already at its capacity limit the whole time.
During the ~300,000 years that Homo sapiens has been around, our technology has advanced at an accelerating rate, with a rate-of-advance roughly proportion to planetary population, and planetary population increasing with technological advances, with the positive feedback giving super-exponential acceleration. Clearly our cultural transmission of technological skills has never saturated its capacity limit (and information technology such as writing, printing, and the Internet has obviously further increased that limit).
So there’s a clear and dramatic difference here, and it seems to date back to around the start of our species. Just what caused such a massive increase in our species’ capacity to pass on useful information between generations is unclear. (Personally I suspect something in syntactic generality of our language, perhaps loosely analogous to the phenomenon of Turing-completeness.) But Homo sapiens is not just another hominid, and the sapiens part isn’t just puffery: we have a dramatic capability shift from any previous species in the bandwidth of our cultural information transmission — it’s vastly larger than the information content of our genome, and still growing.