Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
it becomes like a parlor game of possibilities to try to explain why did what they call behavioral modernity or the upper paleolithic revolution, and then subsequently right with about 10,000 years ago with agriculture, that's when you get the real explosion of technologies.
And all of these things were like the most recent eye blink of human history.
For 99% of our existence, as ourselves, as I'm sure full persons,
in all respects, for 99% of that history, we essentially had the ecological footprint of like other social carnivores.
I mean, there was nothing, our numbers were tiny.
I mean, we were scrappy, we made it, but you wouldn't be betting on us.
The Toba super eruption, whatever, 75, 70,000 years ago, you have an effective human population down to, what, 2,000?
And then you have a human population hovering at 20,000 global.
For tens of thousands of years afterwards, that is not an inevitability waiting to just explode.
It could have easily disappeared.
It could have easily went extinct, just sarcastically.
What would happen with the rest of them?
Obviously, we wouldn't know, and we can never know.
where we are now is such a far cry from what we were all this time that I think it's a sobering thought.
And that there's nothing inevitable about this outcome.
And that people will list, and this is what I meant by it's a parlor game, we can list like
We could probably come up with like 30 or 40 orthogonal adaptations, major adaptations that are all relevant to creating cumulative culture.
I mean, you can even go back and say you need some pre-existing anatomy, like you need fine motor manipulation.
So you need freed up hands, but you don't get freed up hands to get fine motor manipulation.
So you get some other quirky reason that you got freed up hands because bipedalism was more –
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