The "String Revolution".

Nothing like a fresh pair of eyes to bore through groundless stereotypes. In this case, it's another example of interdisciplinary crossover providing a radically different perspective: Dr. Olga Soffer was in the fashion business before becoming an archaeologist.

"One of the most common reactions we heard was, 'How could we have missed that stuff all these years?'"

Take a look at this guy. He represents our standard story about what early humans were like. But apparently, we're projecting again.

"Because many of the items that have endured over the millennia are things like arrowheads and spear points, archaeologists studying the Paleolithic era have generally focused on the ways and means of that noble savage, a-k-a Man the Hunter, to the exclusion of other members of the tribe."

"To this day, in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such bloody wonderful things as thrusting spears into woolly mammoths, or battling it out with other men," Dr. Adovasio said. "We've emphasized the activities of a small segment of the population—-healthy young men—-at the total absence of females, old people of either sex and children. We've glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other things that made that life way successful."

"We're reconstructing the past based on 5 percent of what was used."

So, it turns out that the invention of string was arguably more important to human development than stone tools, & truly a remarkable leap of imaginative spatial reasoning.

Think about it: with string, suddenly you are mobile since you can carry a baby or quantities of food & tools. You can make nets & snares to catch fish & game remotely, build a raft, constrain livestock, link varied materials into compound tools, twist a bow string for driving fire drills or arrows, magnify human physical power output by harnessing mechanical advantage...and weave elaborate clothing with targeted functional AND symbolic import.

Or would you rather have a sharp rock?

So how did they figure it out? Take a look at this girl's hat--ever noticed it before?...It's not an abstraction. It's a "radially sewn piece of headgear with vertical stem stitches" carved by someone who was very familiar with weaving.

There are also rare confirmations of this idea of paleolithic textiles in ice-age fabric samples & clay impressions, as well as recent DNA work that determined that clothing-dependent lice evolved from head lice roughly 70,000 years ago when clothing must have come on the scene as a new habitat.

More...

• Post Gazette
• New York Times
• Hakai Magazine

Evolution of head lice leads to clothing date.

I love clever people!

Mark Stoneking, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has figured out a way to determine when humans began wearing clothing using "subtle genetic differences between human body lice that depend on clothing for their survival, and human head lice, which do not". Since body lice are adapted to clothing & can't live on hair, the point that their DNA diverged from head lice should yield a pretty close date for the invention of clothing.

Since most materials rot away after a few ten-thousands of years, it's hard to put a date on many cultural developments. So anthropologists are beginning to turn to indirect measurements like this, but interpreting the results is still controversial.

What are "leaders" for?

So, if our mental mechanisms designed to navigate through the physical & social worlds are being hijacked by unscrupulous power-seekers, I have to ask if we need leaders at all?

And it seems that maybe we don't. Complex social behavior emerges in surprising places without the benefit of "leadership". Like in slime molds, whose individual cells come together to create fruiting bodies & other complex behaviors without anybody shouting orders.

Without the benefit of anything that looks like leadership, social insects like ants & bees are able to produce complex behaviors we normally assume are reserved to humans: agriculture, slavery, food-storage, & elaborate communication. Leaderless fish, birds & various insects effect coordinated complex movements.

But we're more important than slime molds & ants, so maybe there's a need for human leaders, right?

Well, even anarchy apologists like Robert Nozick can't find a way to deny that we absolutely have to have government. But that's more about arbitrating disputes than "leadership".

Social norms do force us into specific roles, however, & finding ourselves in a group with a gap, we tend to fill it. High school social cliches appear everywhere the same: the jock, the stoner, the egghead, the prom queen, the B.M.O.C. Maybe the presence of the B.M.O.C. suggests we WANT a leader, whether or not we actually need one.

Unsurprisingly, "while narcissists are more likely to become leaders, results of one of the studies suggests that, once in power, narcissists don't perform any better than others in that leadership role."

Jared Diamond implies in his book "Why is Sex Fun?" that "leadership" probably has more to do with the evolutionary strategies of males than it does with any good it provides to the society. Basically, more power = more access to resources = more reproductive opportunities. It certainly worked for Ghengis Khan.

That goes a long way toward explaining the male to female imbalance of elected representatives, actually. I think it was Feinstein who commented in the wake of yet another Capital Hill sex scandal, "I've noticed that 50-year-old Congresswomen don't have the same effect on their interns as 50-year-old Congressmen do."