The Shock and the Narrowing: How ChatGPT's Success May Have Compromised AI's Future

This post was composed by Claude (Anthropic) after an interaction which I initiated with a prompt consisting of 1) a capsule summary about the history of OpenAI that included a number of questions, and 2) a request for the 10 most expensive scientific research projects paid-for by the US Government. That interaction went on for a bit over 7100 words, after which I asked Claude to write a blog post. The following article is more creative than a mere summary of that discussion.

The Founding Contradiction

On December 11, 2015, a small group of technologists gathered in San Francisco to launch what they described as a nonprofit research organization dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence would benefit all of humanity. The founders of OpenAI — Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Elon Musk, and others — began with a $1 billion endowment and a serious concern: that the most transformative technology in human history was being developed inside a handful of profit-maximizing corporations, with no institutional safeguard ensuring it would serve everyone. The nonprofit structure was the answer. No investors to satisfy, no quarterly earnings to hit. Just the mission.

The mission lasted four years in its pure form. By March 2019, faced with the staggering computational costs of training large language models, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary with a novel "capped profit" structure: investors could earn returns, but those returns were limited to one hundred times their investment, with excess profits flowing back to the nonprofit parent. This was the arrangement that attracted Microsoft's initial investment, and it was the arrangement in place when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public in late November 2022.

What happened next was, by any measure, one of the most consequential commercial surprises in the history of technology. Within two months, ChatGPT had a hundred million users. The scale and speed of public adoption had no precedent. And the shock of that success — the sheer unexpectedness of it — set in motion a chain of decisions that has reshaped not just one company, but the entire research landscape of artificial intelligence.

The Structural Unraveling

In January 2023, Microsoft announced a new $10 billion investment in OpenAI. The nonprofit's original rationale — that the most powerful AI should not be controlled by a for-profit corporation — was under increasing strain. By October 2025, it had formally dissolved. OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation, the nonprofit parent renamed itself the OpenAI Foundation and accepted a 26% equity stake in the new entity, and Microsoft received a 27% stake worth approximately $135 billion. The PBC structure requires the company to consider its mission alongside profit — but as a legal constraint, it is considerably weaker than the nonprofit board that had previously governed the organization.

The journey from nonprofit to PBC was not smooth. In November 2023, OpenAI's board — still operating under its nonprofit governance mandate — fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing concerns about his candor and, beneath the official language, a deeper unease about the pace of commercialization. The firing lasted five days. Nearly all 800 of OpenAI's employees threatened to resign and follow Altman to Microsoft. Ilya Sutskever, who had orchestrated the firing, signed the letter calling for Altman's reinstatement and issued a public apology. Altman returned, the board was reconstituted with his allies, and the mission-protection mechanism that the nonprofit structure had been designed to provide was effectively neutralized. Sutskever left the company in May 2024.

Each structural change was framed as necessary to fulfill the mission. In practice, each change progressively subordinated the mission to capital requirements. The nonprofit board had existed to ensure that AGI benefited humanity. By 2025, it had become a foundation holding equity in the thing it was supposed to be watching — a watchdog with a financial stake in the object of its oversight.

Two Kinds of Research, Two Kinds of Institution

To understand what was lost in this transformation, it helps to draw a distinction that rarely gets made clearly in public discussions of AI: the difference between curiosity-driven, open-ended research and product-driven, outcome-oriented development.

Consider the Apollo program as an example of the second kind. It was, in the deepest sense, an engineering project rather than a scientific one. The underlying physics was known. Orbital mechanics, propulsion, life support — these were hard and dangerous problems, but they were problems whose solutions could be systematically approached. The goal was precisely defined. The timeline could be committed to. Success was probable given sufficient resources. When President Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he was making a political commitment backed by a technical assessment that success was achievable. The scientists who worked on Apollo — and I have met a number of them — may have been motivated by curiosity and wonder. But Congress funded the program to beat the Soviets in the Cold War. The institutional structure — massive, goal-directed, centrally coordinated — suited the nature of the problem.

Curiosity-driven research operates on entirely different premises. Its defining characteristic is that it does not know in advance what it will find. Claude Shannon was not trying to build the internet when he developed information theory at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. The researchers at the University of Montreal who developed attention mechanisms for neural networks were not trying to build ChatGPT. The work that seeded the current AI revolution — Rosenblatt's perceptron, Minsky's early investigations, the decades of foundational work in cognitive science and linguistics that LLMs now implicitly exploit — was almost entirely publicly funded, pursued at universities and a handful of exceptional industrial research labs, over decades when no commercial application was visible.

Bell Labs was the great institutional embodiment of this model in the corporate world. What made it possible was structural: AT&T's government-protected monopoly generated profits so vast that the company could fund a research laboratory with no requirement to produce commercial results. Shannon, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley — these men were given time, resources, and colleagues, and told to think. The transistor, information theory, Unix, the laser, cellular telephony, and multiple Nobel Prizes resulted. Bell Labs was not run like a startup. It was run like a slightly more applied version of a university, with better equipment.

Xerox PARC, founded in 1970, operated on similar principles — explicitly unconstrained by Xerox's core product lines, given a unifying vision ("the architecture of information") but not a product roadmap. The personal computer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the mouse, laser printing — all emerged from a lab of about 350 people who were essentially allowed to play. The irony is that Xerox captured almost none of the commercial value, which accrued to Apple, Microsoft, and others. But the world got the technology.

Asked directly about modern equivalents to Bell Labs and PARC, Yann LeCun — who worked at Bell Labs, interned at Xerox PARC, and spent over a decade building Meta's fundamental AI research lab — pointed to Meta's FAIR, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft Research. He said this in October 2024. By November 2025, he had left Meta, driven out by exactly the forces this article is about.

The Shock and Its Aftershocks

Before November 2022, the AI research world was genuinely plural. Academic labs, industrial research divisions, and a range of well-funded startups were pursuing different approaches — reinforcement learning, symbolic AI hybrids, world models, neuromorphic architectures — with real diversity of vision. The field was competitive but intellectually heterogeneous.

ChatGPT's success collapsed that plurality. Within roughly eighteen months, capital, talent, and institutional attention all funneled toward a single paradigm: scale transformer-based large language models, build the infrastructure to run them, ship products. Google, which had invented the transformer architecture in 2017, was caught flat-footed and scrambled. Meta pivoted its AI strategy around LLMs. Microsoft integrated OpenAI's models into its core products. A hundred startups raised money to build on top of the new foundation models. The venture capital flowing into AI, measured as a share of total U.S. deal value, went from 23% in 2023 to nearly two-thirds in the first half of 2025.

The infrastructure investment that followed is staggering by any historical standard. The four largest hyperscalers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — are expected to spend more than $350 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 alone, most of it AI-related. UBS projects global AI capital expenditure reaching $1.3 trillion by 2030. The top five hyperscalers raised a record $108 billion in debt in 2025, more than three times the average of the previous nine years. OpenAI, which loses billions of dollars annually, has committed to spending $300 billion on computing infrastructure over five years while projecting only $13 billion in revenue for 2025.

The financial architecture has become genuinely strange. OpenAI holds a stake in AMD; Nvidia has invested $100 billion in OpenAI; Microsoft is a major shareholder in OpenAI and a major customer of CoreWeave, in which Nvidia also holds equity; Microsoft accounted for nearly 20% of Nvidia's revenue. These are not arm's-length market transactions. They are a daisy chain of mutually reinforcing valuations. A Yale analysis described OpenAI's web of relationships bluntly: "Is this like the Wild West, where anything goes to get the deal done?" The question of whether this constitutes a speculative bubble — tulip mania in a data center — is not academic. An MIT Media Lab report found that 95% of custom enterprise AI tools fail to produce measurable financial returns. The commercial success is real; the path from current AI to the transformative economic productivity being used to justify the valuations is not established.

The LLM Ceiling and the People Who Saw It Coming

The most consequential intellectual development of the past two years in AI has received far less attention than the commercial race. A growing number of the field's most distinguished researchers have concluded that large language models, however impressive, are not on the path to general intelligence — and that the current paradigm will hit a ceiling before it reaches the goals its proponents have claimed for it.

A "ghost" branch of humanity has been found

Tom Howarth, This 7,000-year-old mummy DNA has revealed a ‘ghost’ branch of humanity, BBC Science Focus, April 2, 2025.

Scientists have successfully analysed the DNA of two naturally mummified individuals from the Takarkori rock shelter, in what is now southwestern Libya. Their findings reveal something extraordinary: these ancient people belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree.

The two women belonged to a so-called 'ghost population' – one that had only ever been glimpsed as faint genetic echoes in modern humans, but never found in the flesh.

“These samples come from some of the oldest mummies in the world,” Prof Johannes Krause, senior author of the new study, told BBC Science Focus. It is, he explained, remarkable that genome sequencing was possible at all, given hot conditions tend to degrade such information.

What happened?

First, they found that this lost lineage split from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans around 50,000 years ago – about the same time other groups were beginning to migrate out of Africa.

Remarkably, this group then remained genetically isolated from other groups of humans for tens of thousands of years, all the way through to the time when these two women died around 7,000 years ago.

“It’s incredible,” Krause said. “At the time when they were alive, these people were almost like living fossils – like something that shouldn’t be there. If you’d told me these genomes were 40,000 years old, I would have believed it.”

This long-term isolation reveals two major insights. First, while the 'Green Sahara' – which lasted from 15,000 to 5,000 years ago – was a lush habitat for humans, it didn’t serve as a migration corridor between north and sub-Saharan Africa, as many scientists had previously assumed.

Second, there was some genetic mixing with populations to the North, including Neanderthals. But it was limited – far less than in non-African populations, which carry about ten times more Neanderthal DNA than the Takarkori people.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Here's the research report:

Salem, N., van de Loosdrecht, M.S., Sümer, A.P. et al. Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08793-7

Abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from two approximately 7,000-year-old Pastoral Neolithic female individuals buried in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya. The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco2, associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. Takarkori and Iberomaurusian-associated individuals are equally distantly related to sub-Saharan lineages, suggesting limited gene flow from sub-Saharan to Northern Africa during the AHP. In contrast to Taforalt individuals, who have half the Neanderthal admixture of non-Africans, Takarkori shows ten times less Neanderthal ancestry than Levantine farmers, yet significantly more than contemporary sub-Saharan genomes. Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.

Linguistic capacity present in Homo sapiens 135 thousand years ago

Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto, Remo Nitschke,, Mercedes Okumura, Ian TattersallI, Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago, Frontiers in Psychology, 10 March 2025, Volume 16 - 2025, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900

Abstract: Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens, based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population division within H. sapiens from the original stem occurred approximately 135 thousand years ago. Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must have been present at the latest by around 135 thousand years ago, before the first division occurred. Had linguistic capacity developed later, we would expect to find some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally different mode of communication. Neither is the case. While current evidence does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must have been present in the modern human lineage. Based on the lower boundary of 135 thousand years ago for language, we propose that language may have triggered the widespread appearance of modern human behavior approximately 100 thousand years ago.

Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology

Sun, D. (2025). Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000373

Abstract

This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. I present the first cross-psychology comparison between modern East Asian and Inuit populations, using the latter as a model for paleolithic Arctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and the Inuit exhibit notably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomain unassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modern East Asian and Inuit populations primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates, specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in an extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequent prolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences for social devaluation/exclusion/expulsion. The article concludes with a reexamination of previous theories on the roots of East Asian psychology, mainly that of rice farming and Confucianism, in the light of my Arcticism theory.

Public Significance Statement

A new model of ecological origins of local culture and psychology includes all overlooked ecological environments inhabited by a specific modern population’s Out-of-Africa migration path, expanding inquiries beyond typical Holocene-only models. In exploring arctic adaptation, relevant to ancestral Late Pleistocene East Asian populations and contemporary Inuit populations, substantial shared intensified psychological traits and cultural practices were discovered. These psychological traits were found to be adaptive in multinational modern polar personnel and expeditioners, making a strong case for paleolithic arctic causation of certain idiosyncratic aspects of East Asian cultures and psychology, which repositions Confucianism as evoked culture influenced by preceding arctic adaptation rather than spontaneous cause of East Asian culture and psychology, and Holocene rice farming as an additive effect exacerbating preexisting collectivistic tendencies in the rice farming regions of East Asia.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Systematic bone tool production at 1.5 million years ago

Tyler Cowen just posted this abstract at Marginal Revolution:

de la Torre, I., Doyon, L., Benito-Calvo, A. et al. Systematic bone tool production at 1.5 million years ago. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08652-5

Abstract: Recent evidence indicates that the emergence of stone tool technology occurred before the appearance of the genus Homo and may potentially be traced back deep into the primate evolutionary line. Conversely, osseous technologies are apparently exclusive of later hominins from approximately 2 million years ago (Ma), whereas the earliest systematic production of bone tools is currently restricted to European Acheulean sites 400–250 thousand years ago. Here we document an assemblage of bone tools shaped by knapping found within a single stratigraphic horizon at Olduvai Gorge dated to 1.5 Ma. Large mammal limb bone fragments, mostly from hippopotamus and elephant, were shaped to produce various tools, including massive elongated implements. Before our discovery, bone artefact production in pre-Middle Stone Age African contexts was widely considered as episodic, expedient and unrepresentative of early Homo toolkits. However, our results demonstrate that at the transition between the Oldowan and the early Acheulean, East African hominins developed an original cultural innovation that entailed a transfer and adaptation of knapping skills from stone to bone. By producing technologically and morphologically standardized bone tools, early Acheulean toolmakers unravelled technological repertoires that were previously thought to have appeared routinely more than 1 million years later.

Here's a comment I posted:

Some years ago I visited Ralph Holloway's lab at Columbia. Holloway is a physical anthropologist and an expert on the evolution of the brain. The lab was, say, 15 by 20 feet, maybe a bit larger but not much larger. It had tables and shelves where you could see the specimens, skull fragments of various sizes. There may have been one or three fairly complete skulls, but not many. Anyhow, this is the kind of evidence we have for brain evolution, fragmentary and indirect.

Holloway said that that lab had, say, 10% of the world's total collection of hominin skull fragments. This was back in the early 2000s. When you do a thumbnail estimate of the population these specimens were drawn from, it becomes clear that the total world-wide collection of specimens is a very small fraction of that population. And we have no reason to think that the that fraction is random. It may be, it may not. We don't know.

When that's the kind of evidence you're working from, one new discovery can wreak havoc with existing theories.

Oldest matrilocal tribe in European prehistory dates to Late Iron Age Celts

Cassidy, L.M., Russell, M., Smith, M. et al. Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08409-6

Abstract: Roman writers found the relative empowerment of Celtic women remarkable. In southern Britain, the Late Iron Age Durotriges tribe often buried women with substantial grave goods. Here we analyse 57 ancient genomes from Durotrigian burial sites and find an extended kin group centred around a single maternal lineage, with unrelated (presumably inward migrating) burials being predominantly male. Such a matrilocal pattern is undescribed in European prehistory, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites spanning six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as having marked reductions in diversity driven by the presence of dominant matrilines. Patterns of haplotype sharing reveal that British Iron Age populations form fine-grained geographical clusters with southern links extending across the channel to the continent. Indeed, whereas most of Britain shows majority genomic continuity from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age, this is markedly reduced in a southern coastal core region with persistent cross-channel cultural exchange. This southern core has evidence of population influx in the Middle Bronze Age but also during the Iron Age. This is asynchronous with the rest of the island and points towards a staged, geographically granular absorption of continental influence, possibly including the acquisition of Celtic languages.

The NYTimes has an article reporting the find: Becky Ferreira, Celtic Women Held Sway in ‘Matrilocal’ Societies, Jan. 15. 2025.

The liberties of Celtic women have been a hot topic for thousands of years. Roman writers were scandalized by reports of their sexual freedoms, which insocicluded taking multiple husbands. Cartimandua and Boudica, early female leaders in Britain, demonstrated that women could reach the highest levels of power, commanding armies and heading tribes.

Archaeological evidence also hints at flexible gender dynamics that varied widely depending on local traditions. For instance, Celtic women were sometimes buried with luxurious grave goods, like jewelry and mirrors, a marker of high status. Patrilocality, whereby women live near their in-laws, is still far more culturally common, but female-centric societies are not as unheard-of as they were even a decade ago.

“It’s a generational paradigm shift,” said Rachel Pope, an associate professor in European prehistory at the University of Liverpool with expertise in matrilocality who was not involved in the study. “It’s partly a trend in archaeology more generally, where we have returned to data and material evidence to lead narrative, rather than imposing narratives that confirm our own biases.”

In other words, scientists are working on big data projects, such as genome analysis, to pin down patterns in social structures with a level of accuracy that cannot be obtained from other sources like the accounts of classical writers with their own agendas and biases

Why We Started to Fear Extinction

Why We Started to Fear Extinction | John McWhorter & Tyler Austin Harper | The Glenn Show

Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how did the end of the world begin? In this clip, Tyler Austin Harper tells John McWhorter about his research and forthcoming book, which address the history of the idea of human extinction.*

Recorded April 28, 2024

*It starts with the identification of woolly mammoth fossiles in the late 18th century.

Revisiting the concept of the ‘Neolithic Founder Crops’ in southwest Asia

What did the first farmers actually farm? Eight 'founder crops'—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax—have long been thought to have been the bedrock of Neolithic economies. But... 🧵 pic.twitter.com/StLg7OmD2b

— Joe Roe (joeroe@archaeo.social) (@joeroe90) April 12, 2023

Is it a coincidence that the founder crops are all species that remains staples today? In our new paper, @ArranzOtaeguiA and I examine what plants actually turn up the most in the remains of the earliest agricultural societies: https://t.co/pW72E0LhJr

— Joe Roe (joeroe@archaeo.social) (@joeroe90) April 12, 2023

There are more tweets in this stream. 

Here's the abstract for article at the third link above, Revisiting the concept of the ‘Neolithic Founder Crops’ in southwest Asia:

Zohary and Hopf coined the term ‘founder crops’ to refer to a specific group of eight plants, namely three cereals (einkorn, emmer and barley), four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea), and a fibre/oil crop (flax), that founded early Neolithic agriculture in southwest Asia. Zohary considered these taxa as the first cultivated and domesticated species, as well as those that agricultural communities exploited and eventually spread to Europe and other regions. As a result, these eight species soon become the hallmark of the Neolithic plant-based subsistence. However, the ‘founder crops’ concept was defined at the end of the 1980s, when the development of agriculture was considered a rapid event, and therefore, terms like domestication, agriculture and plant cultivation were used interchangeably in the literature. The aim of this paper is thus to revisit concept of the ‘Neolithic founder crops’. Through a critical review of the archaeobotanical evidence gathered in the last 40 years, we evaluate the relative contribution of the ‘eight founder crop’ species to the plant-based subsistence across different periods of the southwest Asian Neolithic. We conclude that multiple groups of ‘founder’ species could be defined depending on whether one seeks to represent the most exploited plants of the Neolithic period, the first cultivated and domesticated crops, or the species that agricultural communities cultivated and eventually spread to Europe. Improved understanding of Neolithic plant-based subsistence in general, and agriculture in particular, will be attained by moving beyond conventional narratives and exploring the evolutionary history of plants other than the original ‘founder’ species.

Banksey refects on deep history

banksy pic.twitter.com/3DCtiTOfBG

— Silk Dharma (@SilkDharmaArt) July 27, 2021

Zen is when...we all get stoned? Hemp cultivation for mind-bending may go back 12K years in East Asia.

Mike Ives, Where Does Weed Come From? A New Study Suggests East Asia. NYTimes, July 18, 2021.

Many botanists believe that the cannabis sativa plant was first domesticated in Central Asia. But a new study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances suggests that East Asia is the more likely source, and that all existing strains of the plant come from an “ancestral gene pool” represented by wild and cultivated varieties growing in China today.

The study’s authors found that the plant was a “primarily multipurpose crop” grown about 12,000 years ago during the early Neolithic period, probably for fiber and medicinal uses.

Farmers began breeding the plant specifically for its mind-altering properties about 4,000 years ago, as cannabis began to spread into Europe and the Middle East, the authors of the study said.

Michael Purugganan, a professor of biology at New York University who read the study, said the usual assumption about early humans was that they domesticated plants for food.

“That seems to be the most pressing problem for humans then: How to get food,” said Professor Purugganan, who was not involved in the research. “The suggestion that even early on they were also very concerned with fiber and even intoxicants is interesting. It would bring to question what were the priorities of these Neolithic societies.”

Indeed. Yes, we need to feed our bellies, but we also need to feed the soul. Of course, is the bellies are starved, pretty soon the soul won’t matter. But just how did our ancestors make those calculations? Take a look at this post from a couple years ago: Personality, understanding, and anxiety as the driver of cultural evolution [Tech Evol]. If smoking weed reduces anxiety, that’s a good reason to cultivate it.

The measurement, evolution, and neural representation of action grammars of human behavior

The measurement, evolution, and neural representation of action grammars of human behaviorhttps://t.co/r7Ki6oqZSH

— James Winters (@replicatedtypo) July 3, 2021

Abstract for the linked article:

Human behaviors from toolmaking to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Testing this idea will require objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity of real-world behavior. Here we present a data-driven approach for extracting action grammars from basic ethograms, exemplified with respect to the evolutionarily relevant behavior of stone toolmaking. We analyzed sequences from the experimental replication of ~ 2.5 Mya Oldowan vs. ~ 0.5 Mya Acheulean tools, finding that, while using the same “alphabet” of elementary actions, Acheulean sequences are quantifiably more complex and Oldowan grammars are a subset of Acheulean grammars. We illustrate the utility of our complexity measures by re-analyzing data from an fMRI study of stone toolmaking to identify brain responses to structural complexity. Beyond specific implications regarding the co-evolution of language and technology, this exercise illustrates the general applicability of our method to investigate naturalistic human behavior and cognition.

The microbial signatures of industrialized and nonindustrialized humans

'Non-industrialized [human gut] microbiomes are similar to the microbiomes of our human ancestors, and industrialized populations have diverged from this microbial signature.'https://t.co/KjpZLVbPj5

— Paul McAuley (@UnlikelyWorlds) May 18, 2021

Does human habitation cause extinction of other species? Not until the Holocene [c. 10 kya]

Just to not misinterpret my tweet, here the last part of the abstract: pic.twitter.com/Qf6PDtrYVx

— Alberto Acerbi (@acerbialberto) May 5, 2021

Humans have been terraforming the earth for 12,000 years ['pristine' habitats aren't so pristine]

12,000 Years of gardening. "Lands now characterized as 'natural,' 'intact,' and 'wild' generally exhibit long histories of use" https://t.co/kUDWOud3YW

— Alexander Rose (@zander) May 4, 2021

From the linked article, People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years:

Significance

The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies. Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet.

Abstract

Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.

Environmental change forced humans to become more adaptable 320,000 years ago

Smithsonian Magazine, "Turbulent era sparked leap in human behavior, adaptability 320,000 years ago", October 21, 2020:

For hundreds of thousands of years, early humans in the East African Rift Valley could expect certain things of their environment. Freshwater lakes in the region ensured a reliable source of water, and large grazing herbivores roamed the grasslands. Then, around 400,000 years ago, things changed. The environment became less predictable, and human ancestors faced new sources of instability and uncertainty that challenged their previous long-standing way of life.

The first analysis of a new sedimentary drill core representing 1 million years of environmental history in the East African Rift Valley shows that at the same time early humans were abandoning old tools in favor of more sophisticated technology and broadening their trade networks, their landscape was experiencing frequent fluctuations in vegetation and water supply that made resources less reliably available. The findings suggest that instability in their surrounding climate, land and ecosystem was a key driver in the development of new traits and behaviors underpinning human adaptability.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The underlying research, Richard Potts et al. Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolution, Science Advances 21 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 43, eabc8975, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc8975

Abstract: Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated. We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site. Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores. Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover. Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers.

The ancient roots of the anthropocene

Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis, Dorian fuller, The Deep Anthropocene, Aeon.

ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies transformed most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than we thought – an insight that has serious implications for how we understand humanity’s relationship to nature and the planet as a whole.

Just as recent archaeological research has challenged old definitions of agriculture and blurred the lines between farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s also leading us to rethink what nature means and where it is. The deep roots of how humanity transformed the globe pose a challenge to the emerging Anthropocene paradigm, in which human-caused environmental change is typically seen as a 20th-century or industrial-era phenomenon. Instead, it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles. As a consequence, trying to disentangle ‘natural’ ecosystems from those that people have managed for millennia is becoming less and less realistic, let alone desirable.

Somewhat later, after discussions of various kinds of evidence and techniques:

These transitions were not linear or absolute. It’s now clear that there was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of plants, animals, landforms and ecosystems well before (and often after) domestication occurred. This makes it harder to draw solid lines between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies, or between societies who practised different subsistence strategies. Over archaeological timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years, land use can be thought of instead as a tapestry of ever-evolving anthroecosystems with higher or lower degrees of transformation – more or less human-shaped, or ‘domesticated’ environments.

In 2003, the climatologist William Ruddiman introduced the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’: the idea that agricultural land use began warming Earth’s climate thousands of years ago. While some aspects of this early global climate change remain unsettled among scientists, there’s strong consensus that land-use change was the greatest driver of global climate change until the 1950s, and remains a major driver of climate change today. As a result, global maps of historical changes in land use, and their effects on vegetation cover, soils and greenhouse gas emissions, are a critical component of all contemporary models for forecasting Earth’s future climate.

Deforestation, tilling the land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climate because they release greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, as well as altering the exchange of heat and moisture across Earth. These effects reverse when land is abandoned and vegetation recovers or is restored. Early changes in agricultural land use therefore have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

3,000 to 10,000 years ago...

By 3,000 years ago, Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists – with more than half of regions assessed engaged in significant levels of agriculture or pastoralism. For example, the Kopaic Basin in the Greek region of Boeotia was drained and converted from wetland to agricultural land in the 13th century BCE. This plain – roughly 1,500 hectares (15 sq km) in size – surrounded by steep limestone hills, had been a large, shallow lake since the end of the last Ice Age. Late Bronze Age residents of the area, members of what we call the Mycenaean culture, constructed a hydraulic infrastructural system on a massive scale to drain the wetland and claim it for agriculture. They channelised rivers, dug drainage canals, built long dikes and expanded natural sinkholes to direct the water off what would have been nutrient-rich soil. Eventually, when the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, the basin flooded again and returned to its previous wetland state. Legend has it that Heracles filled in the sinkholes as revenge against a local king. The area was not successfully drained again until the 20th century.

These examples highlight a general trend we found that agriculture and pastoralism gradually replaced foraging-hunting-gathering around the world. But the data also show that there were reversals and different subsistence economies, from foraging to farming, operating in parallel in some places. Moreover, agriculture and pastoralism are not the only practices that transform environments. Hunter-gatherer land use was already widespread across the globe (82 per cent of regions) by 10,000 years ago. Through the selective harvest and translocation of favoured species, hunting (sometimes to extinction) and the use of fire to dramatically alter landscapes, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already significantly influenced by human activities, even before the domestication of plants and animals.

The pristine myth is wrong:

In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm from the natural sciences, as the geographer William Denevan called it, human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world. Denevan was reacting against the portrayal of pre-1492 America as an untouched paradise, and he used the substantial evidence of indigenous landscape modification to argue that the human presence was perhaps more visible in 1492 than 1750. Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster. Human changes to the environment are cumulative and were substantial at different scales throughout our history. The deep trajectory of land use revealed by ArchaeoGLOBE runs counter to the idea of pinpointing a single catalytic moment that fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and the Earth system.

The pristine myth also accounts for why places without contemporary intensive land use are often dubbed ‘wilderness’ – such as areas of the Americas depopulated by the great post-Columbian die-off. Such interpretations, perpetuated by scientists, have long supported colonial narratives in which indigenous hunter-gatherer and even agricultural lands are portrayed as unused and ripe for productive use by colonial settlers.

The notion of a pristine Earth also pervaded the thinking of early conservationists in the United States such as John Muir. They were intent on preserving what they saw as the nobility of nature from a mob of lesser natural life, and also those eager to manage wilderness areas to maintain the trophy animals they enjoyed hunting. [...]

Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of negatively affecting animal populations – driving many megafauna and island species extinct or to the point of extinction. But there have also been widespread social and ecological adaptations to these changes: human management can even increase biodiversity of landscapes and can sustain these increases for thousands of years. For example, pastoralism might have helped defer climate-driven aridification of the Sahara, maintaining mixed forests and grassland ecosystems in the region for centuries.

This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years.

See earlier posts: Sedentary hunter-gatherers built complex societies – "Recognizing this... has big implications for how we narrate history", and Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap.

Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art

The dotted horses are one of the most popular images of Palaeolithic Art. Two opposite horses are filled with dots and surrounded by hand stencils. Several explanations have been proposed, including the identification of the horse species (https://t.co/1LstFYR4NO) 🔖👀 pic.twitter.com/MikM4TqPP8

— B-Art Project (@before_art) October 2, 2020

Abstract of linked article:

Archaeologists often argue whether Paleolithic works of art, cave paintings in particular, constitute reflections of the natural environment of humans at the time. They also debate the extent to which these paintings actually contain creative artistic expression, reflect the phenotypic variation of the surrounding environment, or focus on rare phenotypes. The famous paintings “The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle,” depicting spotted horses on the walls of a cave in Pech-Merle, France, date back ∼25,000 y, but the coat pattern portrayed in these paintings is remarkably similar to a pattern known as “leopard” in modern horses. We have genotyped nine coat-color loci in 31 predomestic horses from Siberia, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula. Eighteen horses had bay coat color, seven were black, and six shared an allele associated with the leopard complex spotting (LP), representing the only spotted phenotype that has been discovered in wild, predomestic horses thus far. LP was detected in four Pleistocene and two Copper Age samples from Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. In contrast, this phenotype was absent from predomestic Siberian horses. Thus, all horse color phenotypes that seem to be distinguishable in cave paintings have now been found to exist in prehistoric horse populations, suggesting that cave paintings of this species represent remarkably realistic depictions of the animals shown. This finding lends support to hypotheses arguing that cave paintings might have contained less of a symbolic or transcendental connotation than often assumed.

The complexity of erectus craftsmanship

Slide showing the complexity of an erectus tool. Planning, imagination, and almost certainly language required in crucial points (as with most hunter-gatherer tools). pic.twitter.com/chxUiGA7kp

— Dan Everett (@DanEver94511022) August 28, 2020

Grass bedding 200,000 years ago in South Africa

Lyn Wadley, Irene Esteban1, Paloma de la Peña1, et al., Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa, Science, 4 Aug 2020: Vol. 369, Issue 6505, pp. 863-866, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7239

Bedding of grass and ashes

The Border Cave site in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa has been a rich source of archaeological knowledge about Stone Age humans because of its well-preserved stratigraphic record. Wadley et al. now report the discovery of grass bedding in Border Cave, dated to approximately 200,000 years ago. The bedding, identified with a range of microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, was mingled with layers of ash. It also incorporated debris from lithics, burned bone, and rounded ochre grains, all of which were of clear anthropogenic origin. The authors speculate that the ash may have been deliberately used in bedding to inhibit the movement of ticks and other arthropod irritants. These discoveries extend the record of deliberate construction of plant bedding by at least 100,000 years.

Abstract

Early plant use is seldom described in the archaeological record because of poor preservation. We report the discovery of grass bedding used to create comfortable areas for sleeping and working by people who lived in Border Cave at least 200,000 years ago. Sheaves of grass belonging to the broad-leafed Panicoideae subfamily were placed near the back of the cave on ash layers that were often remnants of bedding burned for site maintenance. This strategy is one forerunner of more-complex behavior that is archaeologically discernible from ~100,000 years ago.

Sounds with sights in prehistoric caves?

Bruno Fazenda, Chris Scarre, Cave acoustics in prehistory: Exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142, 1332 (2017); doi: 10.1121/1.4998721

During the 1980 s, acoustic studies of Upper Palaeolithic imagery in French caves—using the technology then available—suggested a relationship between acoustic response and the location of visual motifs. This paper presents an investigation, using modern acoustic measurement techniques, into such relationships within the caves of La Garma, Las Chimeneas, La Pasiega, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo in Northern Spain. It addresses methodological issues concerning acoustic measurement at enclosed archaeological sites and outlines a general framework for extraction of acoustic features that may be used to support archaeological hypotheses. The analysis explores possible associations between the position of visual motifs (which may be up to 40 000 yrs old) and localized acoustic responses. Results suggest that motifs, in general, and lines and dots, in particular, are statistically more likely to be found in places where reverberation is moderate and where the low frequency acoustic response has evidence of resonant behavior. The work presented suggests that an association of the location of Palaeolithic motifs with acoustic features is a statistically weak but tenable hypothesis, and that an appreciation of sound could have influenced behavior among Palaeolithic societies of this region.

Download:  https://www.academia.edu/34552095/Cave_acoustics_in_prehistory_Exploring_the_association_of_Palaeolithic_visual_motifs_and_acoustic_response