Dunbar’s Number, Trains, Rome, Spears, And The Rise Of Civilization

“Yours is a fascinating tribe.  Even now you are defiant in the face of annihilation and the presence of a god.” – 300

My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes.  Now I call him Dr. Awkward.

One of the mysteries of humanity is how we arrived.  Modern, anatomically similar homo sapiens existed for quite a long time prior to doing anything.  As near as we can figure out, they weren’t particularly bright, but they did have fire, which also might explain the George Floyd riots.

What the archeological record shows, though, is that through all of this time they never even considered the concept of PEZ™.  There was no progress, and something was missing . . . the Apple.

I need to take a step back to Dunbar’s Number.  Dunbar’s Number is the number of people who you can have a reasonable relationship with, and Dunbar reckoned the upper limit was probably 230, but more realistically 150 in most cases.  Dunbar didn’t just guess this number, and he couldn’t send Gallup® out to poll the cavemen.  Nope, Dunbar looked at the cranial capacity of primates and compared that size to the size of group that they hung out with.

Is an ape’s favorite treat rhesus pieces?

He looked at the average size of a human noggin, and came up with his estimate and range for people.  From personal observations, this is anecdotally a quite reasonable estimate on the size of a group where group cohesion is possible.  Other evidence comes from the fact that historically this is an important number when it comes to bringing people together:

A Roman Century was only 100 men (later it dropped to 80ish), and the military unit called a “company” is historically around 80 to 250 men depending on era and country, but most of them are in that 150 or fewer range because cohesion is so important:  There’s a reason that the book Band of Brothers was about a company of soldiers.

I got stuck in Rome for three weeks once.  All the roads have this weird design flaw . . . . (meme as found)

In what I think is an original (I looked and can’t find it anywhere else) idea of mine is that if you map human “mental illnesses” over a Dunbar Number-sized group, you end up with:

• Schizophrenia – 0.4%, so a tribe would have at most one nutty Shaman to see the spirits and burn the tent down.
• Anxiety – 10%, so the tribe would have 10 or 20 people worrying and planning for the future.
• OCD – 3 to 6 people in the tribe would be the ones with keeping rituals remembered, and reminding everyone to wash their hands.
• Paranoia – another 3 to 6 people who worry about everything, who keep the tribe prepped for a long winter or wondering if the tribe next door was going to attack or wondering why you’re staring at them again in that weird way.
• Narcissism – would be just 1 or 2 people, because someone has to rule.

Thus, what are today “mental illnesses” may simply be byproducts of a group traits that led to better survival for the Dunbar-sized tribe.  What’s not on the list, however, is autism, or, to be more specific, its useful cousin, Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now, there are several things that are true about Asperger’s:

• It is a hyper-focus of the human brain on a subject,
• It is inherited,
• Tier 4 locomotives can process a billion data points per second in their fifteen million lines of computer code,
• Lots of successful people have it, and
• It is becoming more common, with numbers as high as 1% of the population now, but probably around 1 in 5,000 if you go back in time, so, rare around the dawn of humanity.

I think there was a time when humanity simply didn’t have Asperger’s at all.  And it showed – back then innovation was a sharper spearpoint.  Nobody needed a TED™ talk to survive.

I bought an antique spear on E-Bay™, but when it got here the spear head was gone.  I got shafted. (meme as found)

But when it comes to the “leaving Eden portion” of humanity’s journey, perhaps the real Apple was another A word – Aspergers.  This quirk may have changed everything.

Now you had someone who really could focus on learning to knap flint in just the right way to better make stone tools, and not chit-chat.  The tribe with “that guy” ate better.

Now you have someone who can really focus, and there’s evidence for this – 35,000 years ago in Chauvet Cave, some Aspergers guy was drawing star maps inside the cave.

“What Grug do?”

“Grug make map of stars on cave wall.”

“Why Grug do that?”

“Me no know.  Grug goofy sometimes.”

(Grug as found)

Thus, we were on the road.  These geniuses would show up only once every few generations at most in any given tribe.  But the nice thing was that they were pretty successful in mating, at least enough to bring it forward.

And, unlike the saber-toothed turtle, the Asperger’s kids didn’t go extinct – in fact, the opposite.

As I mentioned above, aspies are becoming much more common today.  Might vaccines be a part of that?  Well, they could, but probably not so much.  Society has created a sorting effect, mainly through colleges and work.  Smart people who would have stayed around the farm 150 years ago are now congregating at colleges.  Colleges and jobs sift by intellect, and so more aspie-gene-carrying dudes are hooking up and marrying aspie-gene-carrying chicks.

Nerds found nerdettes.  The result?  Jet fighters.  Atomic bombs.  The space program.  Computers.  Trains.

Especially trains.

The train is fine.

Silicon Valley was built by people ‘sperging out, who made it possible for the Dunbar’s Number to be blasted apart, and allow communication and teams from around the world to “meet” and work together.

There is, of course, a downside.  As an old /pol/ copypasta greentext noted, in a world where we don’t have the Internet, if you have a sexual attraction to toasters, well, you ignore it because it’s weird, and you get over it.  If you have a sexual attraction to toasters in 2025, there’s a Reddit® forum for it and a Discord™ server where people get together and share toaster porn.

So, maybe A wasn’t for Apple, after all.  But, it’s okay.  The train is fine.