There Was Never a Sapient Paradox
A critique of the standard model of behavioral modernity and the assumptions behind it.
TL;DR
The standard story in anthropology says that anatomically modern humans appeared early, around 200 thousand years ago, but behaved like modern humans only much later. This is called the “sapient paradox”. The new study by Jakobsson et al. (2025) gives important new genomes from ancient southern Africans, but it still relies on the same binary idea:…
