I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?
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I forget the name, but I read a book that argued that our brains simply were not capable of civilization until the last Ice Age, and it was the ice sheets themselves that pushed our brains to get smarter and smarter. The idea is that if you live near an ice sheet and it’s retreating, then you can move into that fresh new territory, and your tribe will prosper. But whenever the ice sheet is expanding, you have to be very smart indeed, or you will die and that led to a bunch of very smart people right there at the border of the ice sheets, and the timing exactly matches up. When the eye sheets last retreated, those smart survivors prospered and that is exactly when the first civilizations appeared.
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