For Those Interested in Archaeology

I would say instinctive, since we automatically mistrust anything strange for survival reasons. Letting go should be a learned concept.

 

I would argue bias is completely natural…bias towards the self and the family and then the tribe…And so on. Bias is the brother of discrimination, both are natural and have helped us survive.
As for social interaction..we are by far the most social of all the ‘group’ animals, we are communicating across the globe right now…We are a slave in terms of sex, that’s all creatures…but beyond that, even bonobos and chimpanzees are in our deep shade in terms of our social nature.

 

Darwin once said that most animals lived in fear and died young…this is the world we came from.

 

You always give me heaps to work with…
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘no different’, the branches define difference.
Humans have much less ‘number ones’ than most people think. There are insects and birds that have vastly better spatial awareness than us…All higher animals learn from experience…even cats and dogs.
Our ability to predict the future beyond a couple of minutes is pretty woeful. Depends if you are talking your future or say the future of something in particular, like technology. Dragon flies can predict the future…they rely on it to catch fast flying insects…butterfly’s flutter about with no set course, putting off would be predators trying to predict their heading and where they will be when they close in…a dragon fly can even predict a butterfly’s course…

 

Darwin’s model has been tested time & again…it’s solid. But due to ‘time’ restrictions he couldn’t accurately give a time on how quickly these changes occur other than ‘when the environment changes’…We are slowly waking up to the idea of spontaneous evolution also.
He himself recognised a problem with his general theory. He saw parrots for example that had super long tails…These tails were so big and heavy that it significantly slowed its flight and agility…Why would an animal develop something that made it ‘easier’ for predators to attack them?? Perplexed Darwin no end.
He realised a secondary feature to evolution - Sexual evolution.
These parrots wanted to attract a mate and have the best tail above all…these two imperatives, survival of the species vs survival of an individuals genes. We follow because it explains things pretty neatly and difficult to refute. As always an open mind is needed, or you miss everything.

 

The Indians did smelt copper…but the soft metal wasn’t good enough for weapons or tools, mostly jewellery. I would simply say that each ‘group’ develops at different speeds. A breakthrough here or there, or a meeting with someone afar, and the. Course of their history changes…
I believe Europe developed due to living above the snow line, which required far more skill and knowledge than living in the valleys or warmer climates…This created more neural pathways making us generally smarter than those down in the valleys. New tools, new living arrangements, clothes and serious hunting skills were needed to live in the snow. Their development was sped up.
But let’s not forget the Middle East, North Africa and China…our ancestors were digging for peat for our fires when these places were sitting on the third story building sipping tea, talking to their lawyer about a possible defamation case…
We needed time and a catalyst to catch up…that came in the form of Rome.

 

Well, the Scottish Iron Age is recognised as ending around the 8th Century AD, because a lot of the native Celtic tribes retreated back into the Highlands and the Atlantic coast as a response to the Roman presence. Their technology therefore stagnated for a long a time. The Middle Ages were well underway in the rest of Scotland by that point.

Shades of Plato's cave analogy there!

The Indus Valley civilisation had running water toilets 1,000 years before Rome though. And a lot of folk in Britain still burn Peat in the same way Indians burn dried cow pats. Some of it's just local availability, or plain old "this is the way we've always done it".