Memetic Eve Solves the Sapient Paradox

On leaving the uncanney cultural valley of the Stone Age

Richard Dawkins said there were two great evolutionary moments. The first was the emergence of DNA, which marked the beginning of biological evolution. The second was the emergence of memes. Just as genes propagate themselves by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain. We receive ideas, refine or mutate them, and pass them on. Over the long run, the best ideas—the original meaning of “meme”—win. At this point, humans are wholly dependent on the highly evolved memes distributed over countless human brains (and now books and computers). We call this network of hosted ideas “culture.”

In terms of genetic heritage, every male’s Y chromosome descends from “Y chromosomal Adam,” who lived 200,000-300,000 years ago¹. Likewise, everyone inherited their mitochondrial DNA from a “Mitochondrial Eve” who lived 150,000-200,000 years ago. These two were not a couple (imagine the age gap), but they do hold a special place in our genetic origins.

I want to define such a concept for our memetic origins. All of the mitochondrial DNA in the human gene pool goes back to Mitochondrial Eve. What if all the memes in the human meme pool go back to a single foundational meme? The Meme That Started It All. Or, expressed as a meme (in the colloquial sense):

A first sapient thought isn’t such a wild hypothesis. Animals do communicate, but many ideas are beyond them. Human culture is built atop ideas that it seems only humans understand. Things like “I am a moral agent who will one day die” or maybe even just “I am.” Once you have those concepts, then you start wondering what happens after you die, why there is something rather than nothing, and if the rain god appreciates your dance moves. These memes are the purview of the only sapient species, a trait so important it’s listed twice in our official name, Homo sapiens sapiens.

For now, don’t get too hung up on what the primordial meme actually was. Just grant that it existed and that there was a person who first had that idea. Maybe the very first person kept it to themselves or was unable to communicate it. But eventually, someone would have been able to share the foundational idea, and it could have spread from person to person, generation to generation, and tribe to tribe. Let’s call that person Memetic Eve².

Memetic Eve: The person to have the first sapient thought and manage to share that with others such that it became the foundation of human culture.

Before even looking at archeological data, there are a priori reasons that Memetic Eve is more recent than Mitochondrial Eve. First, it’s easier to be taught an idea than to discover an idea. Millions of unremarkable teenagers learn calculus every year, and yet it took the likes of Newton to discover those ideas. Looking to the past, humans likely had the ability to understand sapient concepts before they managed to formulate them from scratch. As such, when someone cobbled together the first suitable creation myth, it would have spread like wildfire. The cognitive substrate was already in place for such a meme to hop from brain to brain. Because some cultural traits are human universals, like creation myths, recursive grammar, and pronouns, it seems they aren’t lost once they are discovered, even though they have to be taught to each generation.

Another reason to suspect Memetic Eve is younger is the fact ideas can leap across genetic lineages. Consider our mitochondrial family tree:

The L branches are primarily found in Sub-Saharan Africa; M and N emerged 50,000-70,000 years ago and are mostly found outside Africa. The root of the tree is 150,000-200,000 years ago. All humans today learn recursive grammar (which is thought to separate human communication from animal communication). Let’s assume that was also true then. Does that imply Mitochondrial Eve spoke a language with recursive grammar? Not necessarily. A new grammar could cross genetic groups by word of mouth; it could have been invented late and spread. Ditto for creation myths.

In fact, linguists have proposed as much. George Paulos recently argued that recursive language was invented 20,000 years ago and then spread, reaching all corners of the earth by 5,000 years ago. Similarly, Antonio Benítez-Burraco and Ljiljana Progovac argued that full recursive grammar was only the final stage of language development accomplished about 10,000 years ago. They don’t mention diffusion, but ostensibly that would be at least part of the story of recursive grammar becoming universal in such a short time. Good ideas tend to spread.

Anthropologists are surprisingly open to the spread of technical innovations. See, for example, “How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution,” which discusses the possibility that fire, the axe, and the bow and arrow were all invented just once. Memetic Eve extends that model to the world of ideas. Innovations such as recursive grammar are harder to track via archeology but no less likely to spread.

This simple mechanism solves the Sapient Paradox, which asks: “If the sapient phase of human evolution was accomplished some 60,000 years ago, why did it take a further 50,000 years for these sapient humans to get their act together and transform the world?” To Colin Renfrew, the archaeologist who posed the paradox, the “act” includes producing art, domesticating animals, and practicing religion—all cultural universals today but absent or extremely limited in many parts of the world before the Holocene epoch, beginning 11,700 years ago. Less stringent versions of the paradox target the gap between Homo sapiens’ origin and Behavioral Modernity, which started to appear 40,000 years ago and is evidenced worldwide by about 7,000 years ago. The dates and definitions are contested, but the gap between modern anatomy and modern behavior is well established. In many areas of the world, something seems to be missing until about 10,000 BC. My argument is that fundamental psycho-cultural ideas—sapience—could have been discovered and spread; Memetic Eve could be a good deal younger than Mitochondrial Eve.

Eve’s Meme (The Knowledge of Good and Evil, or otherwise)

In previous posts, I argued that “I am” spread, an idea so fundamental to cognition that many regard it as inborn. The theory is also admittedly overdetermined and involves more snake venom than some appreciate. But other discoveries could qualify someone as Memetic Eve, and their spread could solve the Sapient Paradox. Here are a few:

1. I am

2. I am a moral agent who will one day die³

3. A creation myth

4. Recursive grammar

5. Pronouns

6. The concept of time

7. A calendar

8. Numeracy

9. Marriage, including the prohibition of incest

10. There are spirits animating the world

11. Religion/God

12. The first lie

13. Music and dance

14. A female sex strike

As Wikipedia says, this list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. What fateful ideas would you add? Be creative. There are 500-page tomes arguing the spread of the first and last founded the human condition, and those events are recalled in Genesis⁴. These cult classics have been cited thousands of times despite adopting fantastic timelines: Julian Jaynes asserts “I” spread 3,200 years ago, and Chris Knight has the sex strike preceding the Out of Africa migration (do myths last that long?). In either case, their spread near the end of the Ice Age resolves the Sapient Paradox. Why not then?

The major weakness of Memetic Eve is that most ideas are incremental. Was there a single person who first realized their mortality or started counting? Did anyone make a large enough single contribution to be remembered as the first sapient person? Newton invented calculus but famously stood on the shoulders of giants. Moving down the stack of giants, was there a Newton of sapience who alone raised themselves above mere animal considerations? A progenitor who, like Egypt’s primordial god Atum, called selfhood into being by speaking his name. (He pulled his “self” up by his bootstraps, if you will.) Or, like Prometheus—literally “forethought”—defied the Olympians and owned his agency. Or, like this theory’s namesake, Eve, first understood the difference between good and evil. Any of these discoveries are worthy of Memetic Eve, if she is more than a construct.

Another consideration is that the ideas on the above list are not independent. Mental time travel and pronouns could have emerged with “I am,” for example, and spread as a package⁵.

Significantly, positing a Memetic Eve makes predictions that are borne out. If some fundamental ideas were discovered late and spread, we should expect a Sapient Paradox, where human culture conspicuously lags genetic and anatomical beginnings. The ability for sapience would have preceded its expression. Further, it predicts the foundation of culture initially spread across the globe, which could have happened fairly recently (in evolutionary terms). If so, one would expect the world’s creation myths to be strikingly similar, but not so if they hail back to our genetic root or were invented independently. Surprisingly, a good case can be made that the world’s creation myths stem from a common root because they contain many of the same elements.

This holds for several other examples: mystery cults that use the bullroarer, the Seven Sisters, and serpent worship. Around the world, these are associated with the founding of the human condition, so they are usually interpreted as spreading 50,000-100,000 years ago, before the Out of Africa migration. But this butts into the Sapient Paradox; those remote dates yield no trace of a culture advanced enough to produce mystery cults, myths, gods, or even full grammatical language.

Memetic Eve is the only coherent answer to the Sapient Paradox in light of the many examples of worldwide cultural diffusion. Given stories like the Seven Sisters have global distribution, they must have either lasted 50,000-100,000 years, or indigenous cultures are far more memetically intertwined than we assume. If myths can last 100,000 years, then surely there are some cultural memories of the civilization-starting psycho-cultural revolution 10,000 years ago. On the other hand, if global myths spread more recently than 50,000 years ago, then sapient culture could as well, resolving the Sapient Paradox.

Either way, founding myths across the world tell of a time when their ancestors either discovered the human condition, or it was brought to them by strange visitors. Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of modern comparative religion, describes these visitors as:

mythical figures that are in some way connected with a terrible but decisive moment in the history of humanity. These beings revealed certain sacred mysteries or certain patterns of social behavior, which radically altered men’s mode of existence and, consequently, their religious and social institutions. ~Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (1984)

Conclusion

Adam and Eve, William Blake, 1808

Memetic Eve: The person to have the first sapient thought and manage to share that with others such that it became the foundation of human culture.

I can’t see a reason to reject Memetic Eve. All that needs to hold is humans had the latent ability to understand some uniquely human ideas before those were actually discovered. Once they were discovered, they would likely have been fit—aided survival and reproduction—and therefore would have spread and persisted. Imagine the first tribe to have a creation myth or pronouns. Those ideas would be rushing into a void whenever the inventors made contact with their culturally bereft neighbors. Why wouldn’t pronouns spread once they were invented?

Human genetic roots go back as far as 300,000 years. Memetic Eve could be more recent, but this would not be interesting if she lived, say, 100,000 years ago. Her story would be as lost to time as Mitochondrial Eve. But sapience is only widespread in the last 10,000 years (or, more generously, 50,000). In that time frame, we have many tools to understand the spread of ideas, including comparative mythology. Myriad myths have lasted that long, including those about the discovery of self-awareness, such as Atum, Aham, and Adam⁶. Further, even if we never understand exactly what Memetic Eve discovered, her existence in the last 50,000 years completely solves the Sapient Paradox. The time delay with respect to genetic roots is no issue, as ideas can cross genetic lines.

Going forward, the plan is to look at the transition to sapience region by region until a global picture comes into view. To give an outline of what those posts will cover:

1. Australia is often ignored in the study of human origins. I’ll start there because it offers a particularly stark view of the Sapient Paradox, having undergone the transition to “modern” behavior as recently as 7,000 years ago. This is coincident with the spread of the Rainbow Serpent, the pronoun na, creation myths, and initiations featuring the bullroarer (a sacred ritual instrument). Many have argued that these cultural elements were introduced from outside Australia.

2. The transition to sapience in the Near East is the best studied. Archeologist Jacques Cauvin, for example, said the agricultural revolution was caused by a revolution of symbols, and this is remembered in Genesis and the Greek mystery cults (some of which used the bullroarer in their initiations). Cauvin and others have done considerable research on the diffusion of these ideas, such as the theme that women and snakes were involved in the invention of agriculture, found in myths from Africa to Papua New Guinea (and, of course, Genesis).

3. Humans inhabited the Americas for tens of thousands of years without making anything as artistic as a single bead. Then, about 13,000 years ago, Clovis culture showed up, spreading their sapient toolkit (including bullroarer initiations, snake worship, and possibly the pronoun na).

4. Memetic Eve requires the spread of an idea upon which human culture could be built. I admit that this is not an original suggestion. For generations, anthropologists have debated if religion spread from a common root. The best evidence for diffusion is the bullroarer, which anthropologists have unfortunately stopped studying because they are too busy understanding the human condition by getting really good at masturbating. As such, collecting and analyzing the last 150 years of scholarship on the bullroarer has fallen to me, and I’m currently wrestling with an exhaustive post.

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1. To give an intuition as to why one lineage would win out over all others, think about what would happen if there was a beneficial mutation on the Y chromosome that made a male 0.01% more likely to pass on his genes. Over thousands of generations, his progeny would crowd out the competition. It really only takes a tiny edge. Further, even without an advantage, a single line will eventually come to dominate just by chance (genetic drift) over a long enough period. Therefore, the Y chromosome and mtDNA family trees both collapse to a common root deep in the past.

2. I’m not being political with Eve rather than Adam. The first sapient idea likely had to do with Theory of Mind or language, which women have an advantage on. For more see the Primordial Matriarchy section of the Eve Theory of Consciousness.

3. My read of “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

4. See the links for a summary of the theories presented by Jaynes and Knight. Knight really does argue the human condition started when women began to collectively bargain sex for food. For him, “at least buy me dinner first” is the Meme That Started It All. As to the connection to Genesis, see page 482 of Knight’s Blood Relations:

“An International Myth

Not only can 'the Snake' be assumed to extend back to the first entry of modern humans into Australia. Its centrality to world mythology (Mundkur 1983) implies that it is older still. Mountford (1978: 23) notes that versions of the Rainbow Snake myth 'appear to belong to all peoples, irrespective of time and race'. Ancient Hebraic patriarchal mythology is familiar with supernaturally potent snake imagery in association with female 'evil'. In the myth of Genesis, it was when the Serpent tempted Eve to 'taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil' that humanity first realised the distinction between the sexes (Leach 196lb).”

Jaynes is much more direct, using Genesis as a key piece of evidence.

5. In fact, in The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization, linguist and psychologist Michael Corballis argues that recursion is a tight package that includes grammar, counting, mental time travel, and higher-order thought. My guess is he would not balk at including pronouns as well, as he has a section on how recursion enables “I think, therefore I am.”

6. Relating this to the Angry Goose meme, which asks, “Where did the first idea come from?” consider a 2,600-year-old text:

“In the beginning, there was only the Great Self in the form of a Person. Reflecting, it found nothing but itself. Then its first word was: “This am I!” whence arose the name “I” (Aham).” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.1

In Joseph Campbell’s last book, he describes how all stories blossomed out of this moment:

in the old creation myth from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad of that primordial Being-of-all-beings who, in the beginning, thought “I” and immediately experienced, first fear, then desire. The desire in that case was not to eat, however, but to become two, and then to procreate. And in this primal constellation of themes—first, of unity, albeit unconscious; then of a consciousness of selfhood and immediate fear of extinction; next, desire, first for another and then for union with that other—we have a set of "elementary ideas,” to use Adolf Bastian’s felicitous term, that has been sounded and inflected, transposed, developed, and sounded again through all the mythologies of mankind through the ages.

The first idea was “I,” calling itself out of the primordial cognitive soup, just as the Egyptians and Hindus said. The recursive structure of the realization could subsequently produce the fractal memes that constitute human culture. To read more, see my 30,000-word essay pulling that thread: