Dwarkesh Patel

across all these different traits from cognitive profiles to resistance to different kinds of diseases, to height, to whatever, that that one pool of people contained so much latent variation that they could supply enough stretchiness to accommodate all of these different traits that you're studying now?

And so how likely is it that the thing that changes the Bronze Age is just that the human population was big enough?

So in 3000 BC, you go to, I think, a population of 50 million-ish people.

The population is big enough that... And the gene flow between different areas is high enough such that...

things which don't have an overwhelming selection coefficient, which aren't overwhelmingly favored by evolution, are finally visible to selection.

Interesting.

But you're saying more generally, once you hit a given threshold of population, the dominant factor is time span.

Correct.

Not population size.

Correct.

Okay.

Interesting.

Okay.

So speaking of data contradicting what you might have otherwise assumed...

One of the papers you sent me beforehand, Malik 2016, found that there are not fixed differences between modern and archaic humans 50,000 years ago.

And of course we know this is the period in which the so-called cognitive revolution happened and modernity started and people are making art or whatever.

Does this suggest that nothing biological changed to make modern humans modern and the thing that happened was some cultural change?

How do we understand what this data tells us?

And this group, 50,000 years ago, they are the ancestors of everybody out of Africa or also some Africans?

The differences we see between different groups of people, especially if this group of people, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, had a very small population size.