Dopamine Boosts Woke Up Humanity 80 Thousand Years Ago

I love the evolution of consciousness! Every time I learn more about how we became who we are, I end up learning more about who I am and who we all are. Development includes and transcends.

The modern human genome was basically complete about 200,000 years ago. But for the next 120,000 years? Not much exciting shows up in the fossil record. The tools don’t get significantly better. The art is minimal. Spirituality seems pretty quiet (though there’s some evidence of burial rituals). Then—about 80,000 years ago—BOOM! Everything takes off at once: better weapons, more sophisticated artifacts, jewelry, rituals, complex culture. Anthropologists call this explosion of capacities the “Big Bang” of modern humanity.

Why at that moment? Why all at once? Genetic development, even punctuated equilibrium, is much more gradual. What happened?

Fred Previc in The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History makes a convincing case that the Big Bang started when humans fleeing drought in central Africa migrated to the beaches of south Africa.  Our ancestors found endless dopamine enhancing food in shellfish and other essential fatty acid and iodine sources. Omega 3 and iodine stimulate dopamine production in human brains (and are also associated with larger thyroid glands and thyroid hormone production).

Apparently, human brains 80 thousand years ago were primed to wake up to new capacities when flooded with dopamine, iodine, and thyroxine. These capacities were supported by existing neural structures in each person’s brain, which became more myelinated with use generating new dopamine-driven neural circuits, moving humanity towards exploration, interrelationships, creativity, longer lifespans, and future thinking. New techniques and understandings became traditions and oral wisdom in the tribes, further driving up future-oriented dopamine production through increasing developmental and social demands.

Populations expanded, like the Chumash in Santa Barbara before the missionaries. This generated more complex communication, cooperation, commerce, mining, fishing, jewelry, Shamanic ceremony, and competition for resources—all dopamine drivers.  As cultures incorporated these new capacities, they became hardwired through all four quadrants—the onramp to pre-modernity, modernity, post-modernity, and the Integral awakening that’s happening right now.

This 80-thousand-years-ago Big Bang is a lot like the Cambrian Explosion 538 million years ago, so here’s link to a Witt and Wisdom episode about evolution from the Cambrian Explosion to current post-issue relationships: https://integrallife.com/from-the-cambrian-explosion-to-the-human-explosion/