A cosmopolitan invasive species
Evolutionists attribute a cultural transformation to our species dating back eighty thousand years: a suite of symbolism, art, and language that seems to have radically reshaped our organizational patterns, turning us into a "cosmopolitan invasive species" capable of inhabiting every ecological niche, from the Siberian Arctic to equatorial forests. By analyzing extraordinary archaeological finds — from mammoth hunts to the earliest forms of ocean navigation — a dynamic organizational model based on narrative and fluidity emerges. I invite you on a journey between past and present to imagine how planning, modularity, and cross-group cooperation shaped the very skills we still use today to govern innovation and complexity.
Introduction
The following article is part of a broader body of work that explores the application of the neo-Darwinian framework within organizational and innovative contexts. Evolution is a highly complex organizational phenomenon, exhibiting fundamental patterns that are also mirrored in the transformation of human practices over time. Consequently, evolutionary biology offers a vast mountain of case studies, providing precious insights upon which to build strategic reasoning.
When presenting a chapter outside its original path and context, a brief premise is necessary to clarify the "pact" with the reader. The book-in-progress follows a serial structure: each section opens with a window onto evolution, reporting segments of neo-Darwinian theory or an evolutionary history—material that is not original but the result of research by specialists. This is followed by open reflections and questions applied specifically to human organizational contexts.
The goal is to draw inspiration, ideas, and potential lines of research from the work of evolutionists. There are no structured theses to defend, nor definitive answers, but rather a deliberately disorganized collection of multidisciplinary inputs. For this reason, you will not find an argumentative defense of specific proposals—whether explanatory or methodological—but an open-ended reasoning that does not aim to establish a dogma, but to foster ideas.
The scientific portion presented here is a summary—a retelling—of the most up-to-date scientific communication, based on the work of prominent evolutionists and scientists such as Telmo Pievani, Giorgio Manzi, Guido Barbujani, and Marco Aime. In recent years, these scholars have produced an imposing and invaluable body of work in the field of scientific dissemination (in the most elevated sense of the term).
A Cosmopolitan Invasive Species
Until two decades ago, this chapter would have been half a page long—assuming it was even worth writing at all. Very little was known about the range expansions of our species out of Africa before the birth of paleogenomics, the branch of genetics that provides invaluable information about our history through the study of ancient DNA. And very little of what was known then would have offered much food for thought.
These last two decades, the most prolific in terms of discoveries in the entire history of paleoanthropology, have provided us with a long series of mysteries to investigate.
Based on current findings, our species appeared in East Africa approximately 230,000 years ago—a very recent period on the paleontological scale. While some older remains show certain Homo sapiens characteristics, the complete set of our distinctive traits seems to emerge precisely at that date. According to paleoanthropology, for about two-thirds of this period, Homo sapiens exhibited behavior consistent with other contemporary Homo species. Then, suddenly, everything changed. About 80,000 years ago, evidence of what evolutionists call the “modernity package” appeared in South Africa: ritual, symbolism, and art. So much so that some jokingly refer to these humans as “Homo sapiens 2.0.”
The natural question is: "What could have happened?" A major mutation? A structural change in the brain? Research has shown none of the above.
Having discarded the idea of a biological leap, some authors began to consider something cultural—one of those great events that trigger a sharp discontinuity between two eras. The leading hypothesis concerns the birth of articulate and symbolic language, the same one we still use in our modern tongues today.
Language leaves no fossils, and we only have indirect clues regarding behavior; therefore, we must approach these hypotheses with due caution. While the discontinuity of 80,000 years ago is evident throughout the subsequent history of Homo sapiens, we must always maintain appropriate question marks when reflecting on its causes.
At this point, I will take a few moments of the reader's time to delve deeper into the matter.
Rituality, symbolism, and art, contrary to what was once believed, are not exclusive to our species. We have found evidence suggesting that these behaviors are very ancient. Neanderthals exhibited them long before encountering our species in Eurasia.
Neanderthal cave art in the Iberian Peninsula dates back about 64,000 years, predating the first evidence of our species' arrival in Western Europe by nearly 20,000 years. A few millennia more recent is the magnificent Neanderthal flute made from a bear bone found in Divje Babe (Slovenia), which has been restored and played. It is fascinating that today anyone can listen online to a sound that hasn't been heard on Earth for about 38,000 years—since the extinction of our closest cousins.
Conversely, the oldest Neanderthal burials were found in the Levant and are tens of millennia older than the European ones, testifying to the geographic differentiation of their culture.
The picture that emerges is very different from the collective imagery of the Neanderthal from a few years ago: this species did not limit itself to subsistence activities but possessed a complex culture with a distinct artistic sensibility, albeit likely very different from that of the early Homo sapiens. Our species and the Neanderthals interacted for a long time, and some authors suggest that their interaction was cultural as well as genetic.
Based on worked and engraved shells found in Indonesia (Trinil) dating back about 500,000 years, some authors suspect that even Homo erectus possessed these capabilities. A sharper controversy involves the species Homo naledi (discovered in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa). Its discoverers hypothesize ritual depositions of the deceased as early as 335,000 to 236,000 years ago.
In short, it seems that symbolism and rituals appeared in our genus a long time ago. However, as evolutionists point out, these behaviors appeared occasional and sporadic until the Homo sapiens of 80,000 years ago, when they began to become structural. It seems more a matter of quantity than quality, but the structuring of such behaviors becomes a central node in the daily life of human beings. It entails an organizational model that places this node at the center and amplifies it.
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The models of the last great human expansion out of Africa are being updated at a staggering pace. As I write, the prevailing theory suggests two parallel expansions: a southern route from present-day Ethiopia to the Arabian Peninsula, following the coast toward India and Indonesia, then turning north toward China; and a second route from Egypt to the Sinai, later splitting toward Central Asia and Europe. An alternative model sees a single path toward the Levant, serving as a massive expansion hub for multiple Eurasian routes.
Contrary to what had occurred several times since 140,000 years ago, this expansion never halted and did not fade into extinction. Along the southern route, traversing the Eurasian coast, it was exceptionally rapid. Specialists suggest that while coastal food resources are rich, they are also quickly depleted. This likely encouraged human groups to move fast, consistently in the same direction—further east along the shoreline. Upon reaching Indonesia, which was then part of a vast peninsula known as Sunda, these groups split, reaching Australia on one side and China on the other.
Along the continental route, toward both Central Asia and Europe, humans took a slower approach. This was partly because their directional expansion was combined with seasonal movements and the tracking of herds, and partly because the climate of that era was far harsher than our own. The logic is sound: one moves more quickly following a coastline than zigzagging through the interior, chasing prey while constantly seeking fresh water and winter shelter.
Within a few tens of millennia, human groups spread throughout Eurasia, reached Australia, and settled in Beringia, eventually crossing permanently into the Americas shortly after the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago.
This expansion is a landmark event of planetary significance, completely reshaping the landscape of the Late Pleistocene. Homo sapiens moved north and east, populating Eurasia rapidly and, as soon as conditions allowed, the Americas as well. Wherever our species passed, most of the Pleistocene megafauna went extinct, and other human species—Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis—gradually disappeared. We became what zoologists define as a "cosmopolitan invasive species." It is a double-edged invasiveness: Homo sapiens leaves behind magnificent works of art while simultaneously devastating ecosystems. In essence, we perform both constructive and destructive feats—just as we continue to do today.
Figure 1: Hypotheses of the "Out of Africa" expansion based on mitochondrial DNA studies. [Map by Maulucioni, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
This brings us back to the original question: if these humans differed from their predecessors only through a slightly more articulate language, how did they develop the staggering ability to occupy so many diverse niches and spread across every continent within just a few tens of millennia?
There are several clues that can help us if we look into the anthropological record of this era.
The magnificent cave paintings of Sulawesi, Indonesia, are 45,000 years old—making them older than those of Lascaux and Altamira we studied in school. Yet, they were created using the same techniques we later find in Europe and the Americas, including the distinctive "negative hand" stencils characteristic of Western Paleolithic art. This raises a critical question: was this form of art invented independently in different regions of the globe, or was it developed in Africa first and then carried abroad during human expansion?
This is not a far-fetched question. History is full of parallel inventions: domestication and agriculture, metallurgy, writing, cities, and irrigation systems. Conversely, there are innovations that spread only through migration and direct contact between different peoples—as seems to have been the case with the use of the wheel for transport.
In our case, the technical coincidences are so numerous and precise that many experts favor the hypothesis of a common origin for cave art.
As a side note, some Sulawesi sites have recently been back-dated to 51,000 years ago, which confirms the hypothesis of faster territorial expansions occurring along coastal routes.
Sulawesi raises another issue beyond cave art. Naturalists tell us the island sits between two biogeographical barriers: the Wallace Line and the Lydekker Line. Beyond the Lydekker Line, we find life forms typical of Australia; before the Wallace Line, those typical of Asia. Between the two, where Sulawesi is located, lies a transition zone known as Wallacea.
During the coldest phases of the Pleistocene, Indonesia was merged into a vast peninsula called Sunda, while Australia and New Guinea formed a single continental island known as Sahul. Even during these phases, to move between these three regions—Sunda, Wallacea, and Sahul—humans would have had to cross stretches of open ocean using seafaring vessels.
Given that between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago (depending on the study) we populated both Sulawesi and Australia, it is clear that we had already developed both the technology and the habit of seafaring before then.
Figure 2: The continental landmasses of Sunda and Sahul during the Pleistocene. The sea space between them (Wallacea) represents the technological and organizational challenge overcome by the first Sapiens mariners.[Map by Kanguole, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
An extraordinary discovery in 2012 reveals that humans reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, along the Yenisei River in present-day Siberia, approximately 45,000 years ago. This remains a forbidding territory even today, despite a climate far milder than that of the Late Pleistocene.
The find involves the skeleton of an adult male mammoth, radiocarbon-dated to 45,000 years ago. The specimen’s bones show wounds inflicted by hunting weapons; experts concluded that the great beast was hunted and butchered by a human group. This occurred during the same period in which other humans were painting the caves of Sulawesi in an equatorial climate.
From the nature of the wounds, it was possible to reconstruct the hunting technique, which closely resembles that used for elephants in much more recent times: the base of the trunk is targeted to strike as many arteries as possible. The animal is then pursued for days until it is weakened enough to be finished off safely by the hunting party. It is butchered on the spot, with every part of the prey utilized to its maximum potential. In this case, fragments were even taken from a tusk to craft spearpoints or javelins. This was a perilous and difficult undertaking for a human group that had left Africa only a few millennia prior. Such a hunt required specialized techniques, significant resources (including protection from the cold), and meticulous planning.
Another discovery concerns a slightly more recent period, yet still within the Late Pleistocene: the find in Italy (Bilancino, Tuscany) of a grindstone and pestle used to produce flour, dated to 30,000 years ago. Plant residues were found and analyzed, providing precious information about the diet of the era.
Given that Italian cuisine has recently received UNESCO recognition, it is a fascinating detail that the peninsula's first inhabitants were gathering wild plants and processing them into flour during the height of the Ice Age. Experts hypothesize that the flour, made primarily from the rhizomes of Typha (a common marsh plant), was kneaded and cooked. The resulting cakes provided high nutritional value. An experiment using tools from the period successfully reproduced these cakes, which were described as having a "pleasant taste."
Nearly 20,000 years would pass between the invention of these cakes and the onset of agriculture. However, the use of portable food supplies in the Late Pleistocene was undoubtedly a key factor in organizing and planning hunting activities. Having a nutritional "reserve" certainly helps when tracking prey for many days.
The "domestication" of the wolf is another remarkable example. Paleontologists and geneticists indicate that interactions between humans and wolves have occurred for at least 35,000 years, likely 40,000. This places us once again in the era of the Kara Sea mammoth hunt and the Sulawesi paintings.
These interactions do not resemble the typical dynamics of livestock domestication; rather, they represent a kind of symbiosis between predators. Something very peculiar must have happened, as both species exhibited collaborative hunting strategies and complex social structures. An alliance between two different forms occupying the same niche—which, according to Gause's principle of competitive exclusion, should compete for resources—is surprising.
Here, too, there seems to have been a paradigm shift, a profound discontinuity in human history. This led to greater success for our ancestors and the future of dogs alike, as the two species managed not only to coexist but to integrate their distinct morphological differences to achieve greater systemic efficiency.
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With this rapid overview of our species' great geographical expansion, we have several clues to reflect upon. This will be a speculative reasoning—more the work of an investigator than a scientist—focusing on "how it might have happened" rather than "how it did happen." It is one of those journeys where the sights seen along the way are more important than the destination itself.
The set of behaviors observed during the expansion phase of the late Pleistocene does not differ significantly from what we see until the Neolithic transition, wherever and whenever it occurred. From 80,000 years ago until the next great turning point, the hunter-gatherers of our species were extremely organized, capable of adapting to equatorial climates, crossing short oceanic stretches, and undertaking daring hunts in Arctic environments. There were no longer many geographical barriers they could not overcome. And wherever they passed, other human species and megafauna moved inexorably toward extinction.
Many authors emphasize that this extreme organizational fluidity necessarily presupposes a highly structured language like ours. As previously anticipated, they hypothesize that our particular form of communication was the trigger for the "Paleolithic Revolution" that led us to populate the globe in a manner both creative and destructive.
Indeed, language is a fundamental tool for organization. As such, it reflects the needs dictated by our environmental and ecological context: for instance, some languages have up to six terms for snow, while in others, a generic word suffices. But we also know that speaking one language instead of another changes how our brain functions and orients our thought process. This makes language not just a tool, but a cultural context that either hinders or facilitates certain directions in innovation—in short, a niche we have built and to which we must then adapt.
In this sense, language is an evolutionary domain: it changes in relation to cultural and ecological circumstances and then becomes, in turn, the environment in which humans evolve and develop techniques and cultures. And since it is not the gift of a single individual, its specific scope is that of the evolution of human groups.
If these considerations are correct, then Homo sapiens 2.0 led language—with its symbols and its capacity to construct abstract concepts—to acquire a central function in group behavior. Recursion and the ability to transmit imagination, for example through hypothetical scenarios, is certainly a prerequisite for medium- or long-term planning, as it allows for the definition of a common goal that is not immediately achievable. The method we have constructed for planning and organizing ourselves is a true narrative structure: we tell ourselves a fantastic story set in our future and then agree on how to reach that result.
Many other species we know exhibit complex behaviors without planning, thus being limited to thinking in the present or, at most, adopting a seasonal organization. We were probably not the first Homo to cross that limit, but we were perhaps the ones who pushed this competence to its absolute extreme, binding ourselves permanently to the continuous elaboration of narrative and organizational fluidity. A language like our own does not merely describe our world—the one we know well—but lays the foundations for a structured, recursive, and scalable perception of reality. It makes us imagine what lies beyond our borders. It pushes us to explore, to transcend direct experience, and sometimes helps us set it aside to experiment with something we have never done before.
If narrative and organization are indeed two characteristics that are intertwined, each becoming the other's ecosystem in a sort of Tao, the inextricable embrace of a cognitive yin-yang, then it is not difficult to imagine why the expansion of our range and the differentiation of various populations was so rapid and, in a sense, overwhelming: organizational fluidity facilitates adaptation to different niches, while structuring ourselves based on the new niche pushes us to differentiate our cultural foundations and become more performant in the new environment. Where the former prevails, we continue to move; where the latter prevails, we become more territorial.
If we look into this "package" that includes language, narrative, and organization, we can find the skills we conceptually use even today and that define our organizational approach. These skills interconnect with one another, with multi-level diversities: individual, group or people, and environmental. The first is planning: setting a non-immediate goal and developing a shared strategy to reach it. In the mammoth hunt on the Kara Sea and in the ocean crossings we have seen, planning must have been an essential prerequisite. When it is highly articulated and involves coordinated action, planning takes the form of a flow in which, depending on the situation, one path or another is followed and in which the interventions of several people intersect. In this, planning and problem solving—decomposing a problem and imagining a corrective intervention—overlap and draw from the same methodologies. We reason in terms of sequential time, we evaluate available resources (including the intervention of other people), we analyze what is missing, and we decide how to act.
The linguistic and semantic part then plays a very important role when a flow of our planning is experienced. A part of the flow is "compressed" and symbolized by a concept, so that in the planning activity this part is rendered directly with a term that allows us to imagine the action we know well. This is the part that connects to the recursive nature of our brain, much like what happens in computer languages for routines and functions. We can call them whenever we want without worrying about how they are structured, but only verifying that we have the resources—in our case, the information—needed to execute them. We can think of this shortcut as an organizational and semiotic modularity that facilitates greater articulation and therefore a leap in scale in activities.
All this allows us to skip entire logical steps when we do anything, but every now and then it constitutes a strong constraint to consider our "routine," the flow we have compressed and symbolized, as a basic unit, immutable and always valid, "natural." In practice, we can easily forget that it is a segment of flow that can be adapted, modified, or replaced when it has become inefficient. In cultural evolution, we therefore have an eternal compromise between the drive to conceptualize strategies and preserve them over time and the drive to innovate. The result is often an alternation of conservative phases followed by innovative phases, which are triggered by internal factors (habit no longer works) or external factors (new concepts, taken from other activities, can be applied to our strategy).
We thus have planning, scalability, and recursion that integrate in a context of group behavioral ecology and over time shape the cognitive foundations of entire cultures. All this also allows us to overcome other limits in available resources, those of the small size of a band of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, which specialists calculate at 40-70 individuals. We can hardly imagine what it means to live in a community of 40 individuals who only occasionally meet other people. Our reference model is very different, and few human societies today are built on a minimal scale of this kind. If we then calculate an infant mortality rate of around 40% and a life expectancy of around 35 years—numbers that were typical even of Western societies in the early nineteenth century—half or nearly half of those 40-70 individuals must have been children.
This consideration leads us to a new speculative idea: that of the first occasional and then increasingly structural cooperation of different human groups. Looking for evidence in this regard is very difficult, so it must be clear that this is a reasoning induced by some clues: the results achieved, which were very difficult for a single human group, and genetic conclusions about these populations. From certain clues in ethology, we know very well that keeping primates who do not already know each other very well together in a restricted context is extremely difficult. Personally, I would never try, even as an experiment, to put 40 chimpanzees from different groups in a subway car. Chimpanzee groups are very tight social entities, in which internal recognition is very strong. It would be like putting the ultras of two rival soccer or football teams in a subway car: at the end of the journey, you would count the dead and wounded.
Genetics tells us that groups of Homo sapiens from at least 70,000 years ago had a fair amount of exogamy, meaning that there was a widespread habit of mating with individuals outside their own basic group. The biological function of exogamy is well known: it serves to strengthen groups, making them more resistant and safeguarding them from genetic diseases. In an expansionary framework in sparsely populated territories, exogamy is not a very simple model to follow. To have a continuous exchange of DNA, a human group must meet others with some regularity, and the fact that none of these lead a sedentary life certainly does not help. Yet the genetic data is this. Even the late Pleistocene activities we reconstructed seem to suggest frequent interaction between groups.
There emerges, therefore, always at a speculative level, the possibility that human groups had an organizational network that supported both frequent exchanges of DNA and activities too difficult for a single group. With a scalar operation, we can perhaps consider the hypothesis that it was not individual groups that moved but small networks of groups, related to each other in various degrees. Precisely the kinship bond and the exchanges between group members would have constituted a second level of technical and linguistic transmission, indeed a sort of cultural symbiosis and co-evolution. On the one hand, these relationships would have been extremely difficult to maintain, due to the tribalism that has always afflicted our species, but on the other hand, the stratification of group membership is also part of our daily habit.
If we take this perspective seriously, we can notice that the same skills we see operating in a group can be co-opted to hold together a small network of hunter-gatherer communities. Our social rituals also have a dual use: keeping small communities united and enlarging the "us" by sharing between contiguous communities, which participate in the ritual but still maintain their differences within an organization articulated among peers. Like the effect of a stone in a pond, we recognize ourselves strongly in a community, more weakly in a network of communities, then again in a network of networks, and so on, up to a regional, national, and continental identity. And on all this are grafted identities triggered by internal diversity—religious, dietary, sporting, professional. The boundary between "us" and "others" shifts continuously depending on the scope and scale we take into consideration.
In a context of hunter-gatherers, identity complexity does not necessarily have to be so vast, but it could still have been at two or three levels, to the point of characterizing small proto-peoples with a common language and with a certain propensity to exchange genes and resources and even to practice collective rituals. The possibility that late Pleistocene societies adopted this type of organization does not imply that they actually did so, nor that it was a uniform phenomenon. We humans have both the tendency to unite and to distinguish ourselves by groups, and we always fluctuate between these two needs, sometimes in a very destructive way, without ever finding a stable balance, so it is plausible that in the different histories of human groups everything happened. Ours is a journey into the possible.
Some clues are strong enough to support the idea of a complex and articulated organization. We have seen "frames" that provide some of them. Another clue is provided by some inventions and some devices of our species, such as the use of skins for camps and clothing, the miniaturization of some lithic tools, the use of throwing and launching weapons, different pigments for cave art, medicinal herbs, boats. All this multiplies the types of resources necessary for daily life and increases the number of techniques transmitted culturally. Having reached a certain point of complexity, it is reasonable to expect both a division of roles by specialization and an exchange of resources between neighboring groups.
In conclusion, the perspective I prefer for explaining the expansion speed of our species is that of a structuring of elements that were for the most part and individually already present in older humanity, but which in their integrated whole allow for a great organizational leap in the direction that still today represents our way of planning and facing very complex challenges. We can imagine these hypothetical networks of human groups a bit like computer networks, with a center and a periphery. In the center, exchange is very frequent, while the peripheries can be imagined as frontiers: traffic with the center is scarcer, but in return they can constitute a connection with the nearest network, if there is one. Two networks exchange, in our case, culture and DNA by passing through a constriction, a bottleneck, and therefore despite being interconnected, it is rarer for something to come from outside rather than from inside. On the one hand, this makes them permeable; on the other, it tends to differentiate them from each other, genetically and culturally, with a speed that also depends on the extent of this bottleneck.
Let's take a practical example: some human groups settle in the lake area and, despite their wanderings as hunter-gatherers, this environment constitutes the center of their range. The groups move, some in one direction, some in another, but in certain seasonal phases they return to the same places. In addition to occasional meetings during the year, they have common events at significant times of the year. They know each other, have the same language, are all related to each other, and therefore share the same customs, despite having peculiarities, and consider themselves the same people. Beyond their range there is a network of groups that follows the same model, but its range is in the hills. The lake people and the hill people have occasional exchange through the frontier groups of one and the other network that can come into contact. Through this frontier interaction, a certain level of kinship is maintained between the two peoples, but narratives, inventions, and techniques also spread.
It is here that we pass in a scalar way to a second level. The people of the hills and those of the lakes are related, but in a weaker way. They know each other but not entirely, and sometimes by hearsay. They speak the same language but have some dialectal terms. They are "almost like us" but not completely. And mediation also comes into play: to reach the hill people, a group of lake people who never come into contact with them can interface through a group that instead habitually frequents their frontier, acting as a mediator.
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Now, after having summarized a very ancient history and proposed an analytical and explanatory framework, only one question remains: "what is the use of thinking about all this?" The model we hypothesized for the late Pleistocene human populations seems very functional, but upon deeper analysis, it reveals itself to be so only in certain circumstances. The hunter-gatherer groups we depicted needed a great variety of resources, some of which could be difficult to find; they had to maintain good relations with adjacent groups; their range was sparsely populated; and to survive, they had to maintain a flexible organization and strong internal cohesion through the channels of narrative and ritual, which had the additional function of building social bridges with similar groups.
In our time and place, completely different from the Eurasia of 45,000 years ago, a model of this kind—reticular, flexible, and decentralized—can function in certain contexts, which may be geographical, such as an area with small towns fighting against depopulation, or highly oriented, such as associations, eco-sustainable experiments, or alternative economy initiatives. This is because the centralized model is still the mainstream: since the agricultural transition, the city has been the place where decisions are concentrated. Everything outside the center seems condemned to be marginal, of little relevance, despite history teaching us that innovation very often occurs precisely in the frontier areas, in a geographical or figurative sense. This rewards hierarchical organization and the tendency to constantly increase the centripetal push toward the center of the system. When resources become scarcer, everything leads us toward the cities, because essentially that is where everything we might need accumulates. When resources are abundant, the city again offers the opportunities to improve our standard of living.
The coexistence of the decentralized "alternative" model and the centralist "mainstream" one is the most logical way to guarantee innovability and to maintain a minimum of cultural and economic variability in a landscape that otherwise tends toward uniformity. Our hypothetical "Pleistocene model" was characterized by a high degree of redundancy, both in skills and activities. From the perspective of optimization, redundancy is generally seen as an expense to be cut. From the perspective of medium- and long-term transformation, it appears as a reservoir of opportunities, an insurance policy for the future. The balance between cost reduction and redundancy is very different in a decentralized network. A node in the network has many independent functions because it can temporarily disconnect or change networks. Similarly, the number of skills it must necessarily incorporate is greater.
The late Pleistocene groups we have depicted, in this adventure of plausible imagination, each had to have a system for training young people in basic techniques, a sufficient number of adults to find food and clean water sources, and to protect children. Even when exchanging resources with neighboring groups, they could not outsource activities to a great extent. It is clear that in a centralized model—a village or a city, for example—there is a significant saving in activities and related skills. And this is the main reason why, as soon as conditions allowed, it quickly became mainstream. Centralization allows for greater specialization of individuals and teams, so that instead of cultivating and developing multiple skills at the same time, only a few are perfected because the team is a part, an organ of a complex whole.
Another problem with a decentralized system is the cost of mediation, but this too represents a reservoir of skills, relationships, and connections that can be used when needed in different directions. Assessing whether the cost of organizational fluidity appears too high is a matter that requires choosing a perspective, a balance point on a scale between the short term and the medium-to-long term, between optimization and adaptability, between savings and security, between specialization and plasticity.
Cultural and biological evolution have many differences, but an important similarity is the unpredictability due to contingency. And therefore, evolvability is given by the ability to quickly change course when the conditions of your ecosystem, of your context, make your model obsolete, while maintaining, above all, a certain internal variability. Since the biological evolution of a population is something that happens, that occurs following a sequence of contingent events, while human organization has a wide margin of proactivity in which it is possible to actively invest in fluidity and prevention, it would always be worthwhile to look at the endless library of case studies in evolutionary biology and also in human history. And then perhaps decide based on strategic objectives whether it is time to start alternative experiments, or whether the premises instead push toward a phase of stability in which it is useful to pursue the optimization of pre-existing models.
By now you will have understood that my approach, strongly inspired by contingency, is not focused on establishing a "what should be done" a priori, but—this indeed—on favoring experimentation and promoting a strategy of evolvability, dynamic and always updated according to the context, if you will the ecosystem, in which the organization operates. The current era coincides with an ongoing systemic crisis, in which the centralist model itself risks being more exposed. The question I would like to leave with the readers is: would it make sense today to strengthen decentralized realities, both to slow down the crisis of centralized structures and to enhance the peripheries? This would offer us the opportunity to inaugurate a range of experiments to find a way to better adapt to what, in the best-case scenario, already appears to us as an uncertain future.
Andrea Marinucci Foa, 2026 - All rights reserved