During that critical period the food shortage, climate changes and other hardships reduced the first human horde to just 5,000 with significant risk of going extinct, just like many other parallel ancestor lines. However, it was a toss, because with such low number of individuals any mutation, whether detrimental or beneficial, would spread really fast amongst those 5,000 (just compare with todays 6 billions). So, we could whether go under really fast, or adapt to the bad times really fast. We were lucky, we adapted. When the situation with demographics improved, then the horde became too crowded, the tensions started rising and the horde split to several groups. Then some of our ancestors started migrating to Asia and Europe. Europe by then was already populated by another human race– Neandertal men, who were short, sturdy, strong,with thick cold-scratch resistent skin, bigger than ours brain and strong skull, and probably ambidextrous, which is handy in a fight. They had a language, used tools, discovered fire and according to the cave pictures even had some religious beliefs while our ancestors still were apes yet. So, they had a big head up, but in the end they went extinct not long ago. In a fight we would be no match, they could take on rhinos and bears, but we had many other advantages:
1) We had much less ambidexteriority, which means we had asymmetrical brains with well developed and highly efficient specialized speech center, usually in the left lobe and less chance of ADHD/linguistic difficulties, associated with ambidexteriority; 2) We had much ligher skull with big resonating sinuses/cavities, which allowed us to generate many more different sounds to enrich our language; 3) Better speech allowed us to communicate and distribute social functions, especially during the hunt: only men were allowed to hunt, and they had more coordinated efforts due to the better speech, which decreased risk of hunting accidental deaths. Meanwhile Neandertal men were hunting altogether– men, women and children, which understandably lead to frequent deaths of children and women.
4) Our race is better in monkeying than monkeys. During experiment on apes and human children of the same development level, apes were better in finding a solution, but each of them acted alone, they "kept inventing the wheel" again and again, while as soon as one human child made a breakthrough, the rest of them quickly learned the trick. 5) Combined with rapidly developing language, it resulted in much faster information avalanch, in accumulation and passing along to the next generation knowledge, skills and tools. 6) In addition, our strength was in universality and adaptability. Europe then was undergoing 3 successive periods of rapid climate change, from warming to ice age and back. This resulted in many changes in the ecology– Neandertal's favorite hairy rhinos, bears and mammoths became less available, and with poor communication skills they had hard time coordinating efforts and changing hunting practices. Besides, their brown hydes were suited to blend in in a woody areas while during ice age the woods became rare, which added diffuculties to their abilities to hunt small game in open. Finally, the glaciers divided Europe's Neandertals into 3 separate groups, which resulted in inbreeding, reduced genetic diversity and adaptability, and finally in extinction. Last ones died in a Gibraltar cave when our race has already started building huts. It looks like they were much less aggressive, adventurous and resourseful, than our ancestors: from Gibraltar they could easily swim on a log to Africa, away from the ice age, but they didn't. Probably, genetically they were far enough from us to lose ability to breed with our ancestors, so they disappear completely.
Our brains as a product of natural selection have several important features:
1) We are prone to pseudo-pattern recognition. Let's say, there's a log on a trail, or a sun spots on a bush, but we might see a tiger or a panther where there is none. If there is no predator, and we combine in our imagination all these spots as a pieces of puzzle into a predator, then we don't lose our lives. On other hand, if we miss a real predator– we're dead. So, the natural selection pushes towards "hyperdiagnosis"– stuff like "you can't be too cautious" and "better to be safe than sorry". Probably, it is the psychophysiological basis for establishing a religion– we see a pattern where it doesn't exist. However, religion apparently offers societal advantages too, so it has to have societal basis too, otherwise we wouldn't see the appearance of religions in every society since the stone ages. Similar trend is called by other scientists "a grouping", or "obsessive desire to make whole object from fragmentary evidence", as Ramachandran and Rogers put it. These property are planted in our brain by the evolution since they had some survival benefits. We'll discuss some aspects of the role of religion in society in later chapters, although within a very narrow scope just as applicable to our topic.
2) Physiologically we see desired objects nearer than they are, when we judge the distance.So, our emotions interfere with our judgement. No surprises then that even seemingly smart people can become delusional "progressives" or any other totalitarian in a state of permanent denial of facts and reality. The "gull chick principle" and "idiosyncatic preference" also might subconsciously affect our reconstruction of the sensory input, our "subconsciously digitally remastered" perception of the reality.
3) A specific gene is linked to the reckless spending and indebtness, namely MAO A gene (Monoamine oxidase A) with 15.9% incidence. I'd love to check the genetic profile of the Washington, DC politicians– may be, they are just mutants, and that's why they push the country into fiscal abyss? On top of that, the Democrats possibly also have a "progressive" totalitarian Democrat disorder which is expressed by shopping sprees using someone else's money, narcissism and need for approval just like entertainers on stage, delusions, blinding political correctness, denial of reality and facts, wishful thinking, non-existing utopian goals, being pathological liars, full of "noble intentions" that somehow always destroy their own country, and most important– by readiness to send the whole world to hell just to feel good about themselves as" the white knights on a noble quest" . It's their totalitarian "sacred values", and if those "values" ruin the world– they don't care, they are blind to reality! The same mental illness affects all other totalitarians: statists, socialists, national socialists (fascists), communists, islamofascists and the like.
4) Another confirmation that our visual perception is not fixed, it is affected by our emotions: if we are fearfull, then hill steepness is badly overestimated from 31 to 50 degrees. It is based on interaction of our 2 vision systems– one for perception (which IS affected by emotions), and another one for visually guided actions (which is NOT).
Evolution pressures push simultaneously in very different directions, and the "goals" might be antagonistic ones. In these instances the evolution tries to find a compromise, a new point of equilibrium, of a fine balance between conflicting goals in this particular time and environment. As usually, nature finds it easier to preserve the existing "floors" and just to build another floor on the top. For example, when our remote ancestors advanced from cold-blooded reptiles into warm-blooded mammals, the question was where to keep the testicles. If you keep it inside, which is safer, then high temperature will affect the metabolically highly active spermcell production, which will result in several thousand fold increase of the testicle cancer. If you keep it outside, then any accident might render the male useless from the natural selection and advancement of the species point of view. We already are disadvantaged comparably to some germs that reproduce every 20 minutes and can improve themselves that fast, while our cycle takes 20 years until the next generation can be improved. Judging by the result, the balance was served better by keeping the testicles outside, but to place it in a least vulnerable location in the groin, to protect it with the pubic hair, with the local high resistance against infections and with the use of cremaster muscle when we need temporarily to hide it within the body (in a cold environment, during sexual intercourse and the like). So, you can see that when there is an extremely complex system in the dynamic balance, formed by trillions of interactions of billions of factors and conflicting goals, then the only way to optimize the outcome is a self-regulation with the tightest possible feed-back. That's why any attempts of the government to regulate these self-regulated processes inevitably harm them, cause imbalances, distortions, inner pressure build up, and unintended