Lower Testosterone Levels In Early Humans May Have Led To Modern Civilized Human Societies

Caveat: I do not endorse the results of this research. As Dutch philosopher Angela Roothaan pointed out to me in a reaction on Facebook, one has to consider the possibility of ideological bias. In any case, I reblogged this post because I am currently interested in deep history, rather than for the actual content of the research. The idea that even the slightest bump or change of course in the evolutionary history of our species has attributed to what it means to be human today, is absolutely  fascinating.

On the other hand, I would hesitate to identify one of those bumps or changes of course as the one and only cause for our current state. Historian John Lewis Gaddis argues in his The Landscape of History that the longer the time gap between cause and phenomenon, the less likely it is for the cause to be of fundamental importance to explain the phenomenon. That does not mean evolutionary explanations of culture are redundant. But I do think it places them in a more nuanced perspective.