Tag Archives: The 10000 Year Explosion

The conclusion of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) sums up the major hypotheses of the book as follows: (1) genetic change and evolution have been preconditions for cultural change (one clear example being the expansion of hominid brains that led to speech and advanced tool making), even though cultural change is powerful and can be an independent force;(2) genetic evolution and cultural evolution can also...

Chapter 7 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews got their Smarts,” and looks at the evolution of the Ashkenazi minority within Europe over the past 1,500 years.The chapter is based in part on earlier work in Cochran, Hardy and Harpending (2006). The Ashkenazim were a Diaspora Jewish community that was first based in northern France and Germany in the...

Chapter 6 of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) is called “Expansions,” and examines the genetic effects of large-scale migrations of human beings.History is filled with examples of certain population groups that conquer, migrate into, or spread over large areas and replace other groups, or replace other groups with some mixing.Cochran and Harpending (2009: 156) accept that cultural and technological...