The Cognitive Revolution

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I'm talking about the evolutionary one, not the 1950's movement when I say cognitive revolution.

My question would be that;

If 70,000 years ago there was a Cognitive Revolution happened, giving humans as we now know them a lot of their cognitive functions, how come the agricultural revolution took until 7,000-10,000 years ago to take place? The agricultural revolution as I understand it being when communication started playing a big factor, and different cultures started to emerge.

Because of the CR, again as I understand, the Sapiens of 70,000 years ago generally had more or less the same intelligence as us modern humans do today. It's a common misconception that up until 7,000-10,000 years ago, or basically our ancient ancestors, were not as intelligent as us, because they were, they had almost the same cognitive capabilities as we do now, they just didn't have the knowledge.

So why then, if they had the same cognitive capabilities, did it take until 7,000-10,000 years ago for us to see any real progress, like civilizations emerging, and etc. On an evolutionary timescale we have progress so much in simply the last 2,000 years. Seriously like the last 2,000 years compared to the last 5,000 years before it progressed exponentially. Likewise, the last 200 years compared to the 1,800 before it have seen the same exponential progression. So my point would be why is there a period of a very long amount of time that takes place between the cognitive revolution, and agricultural revolution, given that after the agricultural revolution we have seen exponential growth, and progress as a species, if we had the same cognitive abilities back then, why did it take 60,000 or some-odd years to see any real, measurable objective progress as a species?

And I don't know, it's very likely there is a specific answer for this, and i'm just ignorant on the subject, however I am still very curious anyways.


Also, without even delving in to the topic of the amount of time that elapsed in between, and why that is; is the large period of time in between the CR and AR evidence that to progress as a species it requires working together? Since real progress only came once we formed cultures? Something to think about I guess.


The only possible conclusion I could draw is that it was very hard to survive 70,000 years ago, especially because of the hunter gatherer mentality. However, that still begs the question of how in the past 2,000 years we have seen many many geniuses arise let alone humans with above average cognitive capabilities prior to the past 2,000 years, then how come in the roughly 60,000 years elapsing in between the CR and present day, there were no geniuses that arose to make any noticeable progress. Hell it might have been hard to communicate, but feels as though there should have been something. 

That brings up another question as well(last one), if species 70,000 years ago had the same Cog. functions as us, why for so many years, did no language arise, did they use hand signals, and not try to establish any real form of communication? By hand signals, I also mean any symbols, or whatever.

So in summary: There always comes a time in history, where even if something isn't being invented, someone comes along to point out "Hey that's inefficient", or "Hey wouldn't this make the process faster?", but what confuses me is that for 60,000 years or so a species with relatively the same cognitive capabilities as modern-day humans didn't once have someone come along to say "Hey this is inefficient, we should do it like this" to spur some sort of progress.