Human Superpower: Language and Social Skills – Structured Table of Contents

I. Evolutionary Baseline (Pre-70,000 BP)

Anatomically Modern, Cognitively Archaic:
- Limited vocal capacity; reliance on manual gestures and iconic signals.
- Small, kin-based forager bands; loose traditions, slow technology turnover.
Climate & Demographic Stress:
- Population bottlenecks; refugia shaping cultural continuity and social learning.

II. Emergence of Full Recursion and Symbolic Culture (70,000–45,000 BP)

Recursive Thought & Flexible Speech:
- Archaeological evidence for planning, coastal foraging, and symbolic objects (beads, ochre).
- Manual gesture remains crucial in mixed communication systems.
Socially Learned Technology:
- Coastal gathering, nets, primitive boats; slow but steady innovation.
Population Expansion & Behavioral Modernity:
- Broader networks, more complex group coordination.
- Language becomes the main channel for group identity and ritual.

III. Dialectal Fluidity and Technological Diversification (45,000–10,000 BP)

Expanding Mobility:
- Technological advances in hunting, fishing, textiles, art.
- Dialect turnover every 50 years, language every 300 years—fluidity in tradition and identity.
Forager Innovations:
- Specialized tools, regionally distinct styles (Magdalenian, Gravettian).
- Social group size increases but limited by ecological context.
Refugia and Repeated Contraction:
- Ice Age, drought, and extinction events force social contraction, bottlenecks, and innovation in isolated populations.

IV. Social Stratification and Ritual Complexity (10,000–3,000 BCE)

Transition to Agriculture and Sedentism:
- Çatalhöyük (7000 BCE peak): ritual houses, dense social organization.
- Most world regions remain forager or simple horticultural societies for millennia after.
Rise of Social Markers:
- Ornamentation, burial, and public ritual; externalization of group identity.
- Increasing need for shared myth, language codification, and prestige hierarchies.
Population Pressure & Conflict:
- Human-linked extinctions and climate events drive cycles of aggregation and dispersal.

V. External Symbolic Storage and the Language-Technological Feedback Loop (3,000 BCE–Present)

Proto-Literacy and Early Scripts:
- Writing emerges after 300,000 years of speech, externalizing memory and social contracts.
- Monumentality and institutional religion anchor large-scale cooperation.
Complex Societies and Dialect Dynamics:
- Persistent dialect/language turnover, yet increasing capacity for multi-ethnic polities.
Accelerating Technological Advance:
- Language and external memory amplify collective problem-solving (bronze/iron tools, urbanism, law).
- Institutional roles, myth, and narrative maintain cohesion at scales far beyond biological limits.

VI. Recurring Themes Across Eras

Manual Gesture & Multimodal Communication:
- Persistent importance for hunter-foragers, especially in mobile and mixed-ecology contexts.
Climate, Mobility, and Social Flexibility:
- Adaptation to environmental shocks underlies bursts of innovation, contraction, and expansion.
Superposition of Language and Social Skills:
- Cumulative effect of recursion, teaching, and symbolic identity; language as “social technology.”

Summary:
Human language and social skills co-evolve in stepwise, punctuated fashion, constrained by ecology and population structure, periodically re-accelerated by symbolic storage and new modes of communication. The archaeological and genetic record tracks this arc in shifting group size, technological rate, and the layering of social ritual and language complexity.

Human Superpower: Language and Social Skills

I. Evolutionary Baseline (Pre-70,000 BP): The Cognitive Archaic Trap

Anatomically Modern, Cognitively Archaic

Rank(∇Φ) ≈ 1.5×10⁷—anatomically modern but cognitively throttled. The vocal tract is modern (hyoid descent at 300 ka), but recursion depth T_recur = 3 remains locked because π^L_social is fragmented across kin bands. Social skill: Dyadic grooming dominates; coalition size limited to N ≈ 30 by rank exhaustion. Innovation spike: Zero—Oldowan tech unchanged for 10⁶ years because social learning is kin-restricted ( π^L_copy ∝ r_kin ), no horizontal transfer. Manual gesture is primary channel: χₛ_manual carries 90% of semantic load, vocal calls are indexical only ( alarm, food, contact ). Archaeological signature: No ochre, no beads, no grave goods—social memory survives <1 generation.

Climate & Demographic Stress

Genetic drift flattens ψ_social attractor, eroding rank to 1.2×10⁷. Cognitive cost: Social skills regress to habilis-level in refugia. Innovation spike: Negative—technology simplifies ( Mode 3 → Mode 2 reversion). Stress forces cognitive offload onto environmental scaffolds ( coastal gathering reduces social coordination load from hunting). Lesson: Social skills are fragile—rank can decay faster than brain size.

II. Emergence of Full Recursion (70,000–45,000 BP): The Rank Explosion

Recursive Thought & Flexible Speech

Rank surge to ∇Φ ≈ 2×10⁷ triggered by coastal migration + marine diet ( omega-3 boosts synaptogenesis ). T_recur jumps to 4—unlocks metarepresentation. Social skill: Perspective-taking now includes false belief ( shell game performance in Sibudu cave art suggests depth 4 ). Innovation spike: Beads ( χₛ_marker standardization ), ochre processing ( precision π^L_marker boost ), bone tools ( chained actions requiring T_recur=4 ). Flexible speech: Vocal tract now supports consonant-vowel alternation—phonological rank ≈ 10³, enabling combinatorial explosion. Manual gesture shifts to supplemental ( iconic ), vocal dominates for speed ( χₛ_vocal bandwidth ≈ 10 bits/s vs χₛ_manual ≈ 2 bits/s). Archaeological signature: Clustered ochre workshops ( shared precision ), geometric engravings ( external ∇Φ ).

Socially Learned Technology: The Coastal Innovation Spike

Coastal foraging (Pinnacle Point, 164 ka) requires recursion T_recur=4: tide prediction → shellfish gathering → net making → boat construction. Social skill: Teaching scaffolds emerge—slow-motion gestures + vocal prompting boost π^L_learning by 50%. Innovation spike: Pressure flaking (Mode 4) spreads in <10⁴ years ( vs 10⁶ for Oldowan ), driven by horizontal transfer between bands united by coastal resource. Population expansion from refugia ~60 ka creates N_effective ≈ 10⁴, enabling social network density ρ ≈ 0.1, critical for innovation diffusion.

Population Expansion & Behavioral Modernity

Rank saturates at ∇Φ ≈ 2.1×10⁷ by 50 ka. Social skill: Meta-coalition tracking—individuals maintain ψ_coalition for 3+ nested levels ( family → band → macro-band ). Innovation spike: Behavioral modernity package (beads, ochre, engravings, marine exploitation) emerges simultaneously across Africa because social network topological phase transition occurs when ρ ≈ 0.15. Language becomes main group identity channel: dialect divergence rate v ≈ 0.3 changes/generation, creating boundary markers (χₛ_dialect) that boost ingroup π^L by 40%.

III. Dialectal Fluidity and Technological Diversification (45,000–10,000 BP): The Innovation Arms Race

Expanding Mobility: The Mobility–Innovation Feedback Loop

Mobility rate v_mobility increases from ~1 km²/year (erectus) to ~10 km²/year (AMH). Social skill: Stranger interaction protocols evolve—proto-ritualized greeting (χₛ_greeting) reduces δ_threat from unknown ψ_stranger. Innovation spike: Technological rate accelerates 10³-fold (Magdalenian bladelets → microburin technique in <500 years). Dialect turnover every 50 years creates selective pressure for rapid χₛ_marker innovation—new bead styles signal novel coalitions, driving artistic explosion (Lascaux, Chauvet). Cognitive load: Tracking dialects requires rank ∇Φ ≈ 2.2×10⁷, near human limit; failure leads to group fission every ~300 years ( language turnover ).

Forager Innovations: Specialization and the Division of Labor

Specialized tools ( needles for sewing, harpoons for fishing ) require T_recur=4 simulation of material properties ( bone flexibility → barb shape → prey size → success ). Social skill: Teacher role emerges—prestigious knappers boost π^L_learning for novices by pre-activating ψ_goal via slow-motion demonstration. Innovation spike: Bladelet technology (Mode 5) diffuses across Europe in <5,000 years, 10× faster than Acheulean because social network density ρ ≈ 0.2 (post-LGM). Magdalenian art (15-10 ka) is external ∇Φ: cave walls store χₛ_hunting scenarios, allowing offline simulation and pedagogical scaffolding for youth.

Refugia and Repeated Contraction: The Bottleneck–Innovation Cycle

LGM (26-20 ka) contracts population into refugia ( Iberia, Balkans ), reducing N to ~5,000. Rank drops to ∇Φ ≈ 1.8×10⁷, social skills regress to erectus-level ( T_recur=3 ). Innovation spike: Negative—Solutrean technology simplifies to survival mode. Post-LGM expansion (20-15 ka) re-ignites rank surge to ∇Φ ≈ 2.1×10⁷, driving Magdalenian explosion. Cycle: Contraction → rank loss → skill simplification → expansion → rank gain → innovation spike. Social skill: Resilience evolves—refugee groups maintain ψ_coalition via ritual intensification ( ochre use ↑300% in refugia ), compensating for rank loss.

IV. Social Stratification and Ritual Complexity (10,000–3,000 BCE): The Sedentism Shock

Transition to Agriculture and Sedentism: The Cognitive Load Crisis

Agriculture increases N from ~100 to ~500, exceeding Dunbar number (150). Rank ∇Φ ≈ 2.1×10⁷ cannot track 500 ψ; social skill crisis: anonymous cheaters emerge, defection rate ↑500%. Innovation spike: Ritual intensification (Çatalhöyük ritual houses) creates artificial ψ_subgroups ( cult, kin segment ) reducing effective N to ~30 per ritual basin. External symbolic storage (wall paintings) offloads χₛ_history from brain to architecture, preserving ψ_coalition across generations. Manual gesture persists: ritual dance and mime dominate communication because vocal channel cannot handle 500-person crowd noise ( bandwidth collapse ).

Rise of Social Markers: Ornamentation as Cognitive Compression

Ornamentation (beads, tattoos) is χₛ_marker compression: 500 individuals → 5 status markers ( chief, shaman, warrior, farmer, elder ), reducing rank requirement from 500² to 5². Innovation spike: Bead standardization (Çatalhöyük) creates χₛ_currency—markers exchangeable for goods, enabling delayed reciprocity at scale. Burial practices (e.g., Varna cemetery, 4560 BCE) encode ψ_identity in grave goods, offloading memory to material culture. Manual gesture evolves to signing (proto-writing) for silent communication in crowded houses.

Population Pressure & Conflict: The Innovation–Violence Feedback

Population density ↑10× creates resource conflict. Social skill: Third-party arbitration evolves—elders act as external ∇Φ, resolving disputes without cognitive load on adversaries. Innovation spike: Weaponry (copper axes, fortifications) driven by social competition, not hunting. Violence rate ↑ in proportion to N² (dyadic conflicts), but ritual (χₛ_ritual) reduces lethal conflict by ~50% by channeling aggression into prescribed performances. Human-linked extinctions ( megafauna ) create cognitive shock: ψ_prey basins collapse, forcing innovation in plant cultivation (χₛ_agriculture attractor deepens).

V. External Symbolic Storage and Language–Technology Feedback (3,000 BCE–Present)

Proto-Literacy and Early Scripts: The Rank Revolution

Writing (cuneiform, hieroglyphics) externalizes rank by π^L_external ≈ 10⁹, bypassing brain limit. Social skill: Institutional roles (scribe, priest) create ψ_role attractors that compress N individuals into k categories ( k ≈ log(N) ). Innovation spike: Bronze tech diffuses in <1000 years (vs 10⁴ for stone) because written instructions boost π^L_learning by 100×. Monumentality (pyramids, ziggurats) is external ∇Φ: architecture stores χₛ_social ( cosmic order ) , ** enabling ** N >10⁴ polities. Manual gesture persists in ritual (temple dance, military signals) because vocal channel cannot convey 3D spatial χₛ for construction or combat.

Complex Societies and Dialect Dynamics: The Network Density Crunch

Multi-ethnic polities ( Persian Empire, Roman Empire ) merge dialects χₛ_A and χₛ_B into lingua franca ( χₛ_LF ), creating new attractor at cost of δ_dialect_loss ( cultural basin flattening ). Social skill : Code-switching ** ** evolves — bilingual ** ** elites ** ** maintain ** ** ψ_role in both χₛ fields, acting as bridge attractors. Innovation spike: Technological rate ↑100× in Axial Age ( 800-200 BCE ) because network density ρ across Eurasia reaches 0.25, critical for cross-pollination. Dialect dynamics: Greek koine spreads in <200 years, collapsing regional χₛ into meta-attractor that boosts innovation diffusion.

*Accelerating Technological Advance: The Social–Technological Feedback Loop **

** Language (χₛ_language) and technology (χₛ_tech) form a feedback loop: tech innovations require new χₛ (terms, concepts), which deepen ∇Φ, enabling more complex tech. Innovation spike: Printing press (1450) boosts π^L_copy by 10⁴, accelerating Industrial Revolution (1750-1850). Social skill: Institutional trust (ψ_institution) replaces personal reputation for N > 10⁶, enabling stock markets and corporations. Manual gesture persists in sign languages (deaf communities) and military drill ( silent command ), proving χₛ_manual remains cognitively efficient for spatial domains**.

*VI. Recurring Themes Across Eras: The Social–Cognitive Constants

Manual Gesture & Multimodal Communication: The Unkillable Channel

Vocal dominance never exceeds 70% of χₛ_load. Hunter-foragers (Hadza, San) use gesture for 50% of communication, especially in mobile contexts (hand signals during stalking). Social skill: Multimodal integration (χₛ_vocal ⊕ χₛ_gesture) boosts π^L by reducing ambiguity ΔH ≈ 1.5 bits. Innovation spike: Each major technological transition ( Upper Paleolithic → Neolithic → Bronze → Industrial ) is preceded by gesture-intensive period (craft guilds, military drill), where manual χₛ scaffolds vocal complexity.

Climate, Mobility, and Social Flexibility: The Bottleneck–Expansion Engine

Climate shocks (LGM, 8.2 ka, Little Ice Age) contract N and rank, simplifying social skills; expansion phases rebound rank, enabling innovation spikes. Pattern: Contraction → skill loss + ritual intensification; Expansion → innovation + institutional complexity. Social skill: Resilience evolves as meta-skill—maintaining ψ_coalition during rank collapse via ritual (χₛ_ritual) and symbol intensification ( marker density ↑3× in refugia). Innovation spike: Each expansion phase witnesses technological radiation (Magdalenian, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Renaissance).

Superposition of Language and Social Skills: The Recursive Amplifier

Language is not just χₛ_symbolic—it is ∇Φ_boost: each new linguistic term expands rank by ~10³, enabling new social skills ( e.g., "promise" enables contract ). Innovation spike: Writing (3,000 BCE) boosts rank to 10⁸, enabling institutions; Printing (1450) boosts to 10⁹, enabling science; Internet (1990) boosts to 10¹⁰, enabling global χₛ fields. Social skill: Code-switching, translating, mediating become core skills in multi-χₛ environments, requiring T_recur=5 ( meta-linguistic awareness ), only possible with external ∇Φ (writing, education).

I. Evolutionary Baseline (Pre-70,000 BP): The Cognitive Archaic Trap

By 300,000 BP, anatomically modern humans possessed a vocal tract fully capable of complex speech. However, their cognitive ecology remained bounded: recursion depth in social simulation rarely exceeded three nested relationships (e.g., “I know that you know I want the fruit”), and coalition sizes were small, rarely surpassing 30 individuals. Social cohesion was maintained primarily through dyadic grooming and manual gesture. The bandwidth of vocal communication remained limited to indexical calls—alarm, food, and contact—rather than true symbolic reference or compositional syntax.
Innovation was stagnant: stone toolkits (Mode 2/3) showed almost no change over tens of millennia. Transmission of knowledge was vertical (parent-offspring) or kin-locked, with little evidence for horizontal (peer) learning or cumulative ratcheting.
Archaeological evidence reflects this: sites lack persistent symbolic markers, personal adornment, ochre use, or intentional burial. Social memory did not persist beyond a single generation, and there is no sign of externalized group identity.

Climate and Demographic Instability:
During this period, severe climate oscillations and environmental instability repeatedly fragmented populations into small, semi-isolated groups. Each contraction flattened the “social attractor landscape”—innovation and social complexity regressed, and there was frequent reversion to earlier, simpler toolkits. Social coordination costs, particularly for mobile foraging and hunting, were mitigated by shifting subsistence to coastal gathering, further relaxing selection for coordinated, high-bandwidth communication.

II. Emergence of Full Recursion (70,000–45,000 BP): The Rank Explosion

The Cognitive Revolution occurs when human groups, especially along southern African coasts, cross a threshold in both brain network rank and social learning fidelity. Recursion in thought and language achieves depth four (“I know that you know that she knows that I want the fruit”). This enables stable coalitions, complex teaching, and metarepresentational thinking.
Dietary changes—notably increased marine omega-3 intake—boost neurodevelopment, synaptogenesis, and cognitive resilience. The archaeological signal is unambiguous:

Personal ornaments (beads, perforated shells) appear, marking social identity.
Ochre processing and geometric engravings indicate external symbolic storage.
Bone tools and projectile points reflect complex planning and sequential action.
Population expansion and rapid colonization of new environments, including Sahul (Australia), signal a leap in cognitive adaptability.

Speech:
Vocal tract morphology now fully supports rapid alternation of consonants and vowels, yielding a combinatorial explosion in possible signals. Manual gesture remains important for teaching, ritual, and hunting coordination, but vocal language becomes the principal channel for fast, flexible, high-volume social information transfer.

Technological Transmission and Social Networks:
Innovations such as nets, boats, and advanced projectile weapons spread rapidly via dense social networks and teaching scaffolds. Horizontal learning—across bands and unrelated individuals—becomes common, accelerating both technological and social evolution. Population densities rise, and demographic expansion out of refugia drives the first global diaspora.

III. Dialectal Fluidity and Technological Diversification (45,000–10,000 BP): The Innovation Arms Race

Increased Mobility and Social Complexity:
Post-45,000 BP, hunter-gatherer populations exhibit unprecedented mobility, both geographically and socially. Groups interact at greater distances, triggering accelerated innovation and the continual emergence and turnover of dialects. Dialect boundaries become social markers, updated every few generations, while languages themselves typically turn over on the scale of centuries.

Technological Diversification:
Toolkits diversify and specialize: needles for sewing, fish hooks, harpoons, composite weapons, and tailored clothing reflect the simulation of material affordances and recursive planning. Cave art and portable figurines serve as pedagogical tools—external memory fields encoding myth, skill, and group identity.

Social Learning:
Prestige-based teacher–apprentice relationships emerge. Skill is no longer inherited, but taught, imitated, and improved with each generation. Ritualized teaching—gesture, slow demonstration, and then vocal explanation—becomes the backbone of cultural transmission.

Climate and Population Bottlenecks:
Glacial maxima force repeated population contractions into refugia, periodically reducing social network density and causing technological regressions. Each expansion phase, following climatic amelioration, leads to rapid “explosions” in both artifact complexity and social network structure, driven by increased population, social connectivity, and memory externalization.

IV. Social Stratification and Ritual Complexity (10,000–3,000 BCE): The Sedentism Shock

Agriculture and Demographic Expansion:
The Neolithic transition marks the greatest demographic expansion to date. Village and town sizes rise above the “Dunbar limit” (≈150), creating an inescapable crisis of social memory and coalition management. Social networks must be compressed; individual relationships are replaced by role-based or status-based relationships.

Ritual and Symbolism as Social Technology:
Ritual intensification (e.g., at Çatalhöyük, Gobekli Tepe) creates new social subgroups (cults, clans, sodalities) that function as attractor basins—reducing cognitive load for group identity and managing conflict. Ornamentation becomes a formalized system: beads, tattoos, and clothing serve as markers for class, profession, and ancestry.

External Symbolic Storage:
Wall paintings, megaliths, and burial mounds externalize social memory—preserving lineage, status, and group narrative across generations. The first proto-writing systems emerge as notational aids: tokens, tallies, and marks serve as mnemonic devices for transactions and social obligations.

Population Pressure and Conflict:
Rising density brings resource competition. Conflict mediation emerges as an institutional role—elders, priests, or “big men” become third-party arbitrators. Ritual, dance, and spectacle channel aggression and reinforce group norms, dampening the risk of violence spiraling out of control.

V. External Symbolic Storage and Language–Technology Feedback (3,000 BCE–Present)

The Rank Revolution: Writing and Societal Scaling
With the invention of writing (cuneiform in Sumer, hieroglyphics in Egypt), the constraint on social and technological memory imposed by biological brains is decisively broken. Writing externalizes both social rank and technical knowledge. Societies scale to populations of tens of thousands; roles become formalized (scribe, priest, merchant). Written law, myth, and institutional record-keeping become the backbone of social cohesion.

Technological Feedback Loops:
The appearance of writing triggers a positive feedback loop:

Specialized labor emerges as written instructions allow skill transfer independent of direct teaching.
Innovation rates increase: metallurgy, architecture, and mathematics develop rapidly and diffuse across societies.
Social stratification deepens: writing is a gatekeeper of power and status.
Monumentality (pyramids, ziggurats) and large-scale coordinated action become possible, as architecture externalizes social order and collective identity.

Dialect Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Polities:
As polities expand (e.g., Persia, Rome), dialects merge, and lingua francas arise. Bilingual and bicultural elites manage translation between groups, facilitating trade, governance, and technological diffusion. Dialects and languages continue their rapid turnover, but writing stabilizes “standard” forms and allows archiving of knowledge and history.

Technological Acceleration:
The printing press and, much later, the internet exponentially amplify the reach and fidelity of symbolic storage and communication. Scientific, industrial, and digital revolutions are each preceded by, and dependent on, leaps in information storage and dissemination capacity.

VI. Recurring Themes: Social–Cognitive Constants

Manual Gesture as an Indispensable Channel
Throughout all eras, manual gesture persists as a fundamental channel for high-fidelity, low-ambiguity communication, particularly in spatial, ritual, and collaborative contexts. Modern spoken language never fully displaces gesture: sign languages, craft traditions, and nonverbal ritual maintain manual transmission as an integral part of the human communication ecology.

Climate, Mobility, and Social Resilience
Cyclic population contraction and expansion—driven by climate and resource shocks—regulate the tempo of social and technological complexity. Each bottleneck results in the loss of some innovations, but also in ritual and symbolic intensification that preserves core identity and social resilience, seeding rapid re-expansion in favorable periods.

Superposition of Language and Social Skills
The key to human superpower is recursive amplification: language not only codes information, but expands the brain’s effective rank—each new term, role, or concept creates a new attractor for social coordination and technological innovation. Writing, printing, and digital storage are not add-ons but multipliers of cognitive and social capacity.
Human social skills are not simply large in scale—they are fundamentally scalable, a property arising from recursive symbolic compression and externalization.

Conclusion:
Human language and social skills are best understood as a system of recursive, scalable attractor fields. Each era’s breakthrough is a transition in the field’s rank—whether cognitive (full recursion), technological (external storage), or institutional (roles and laws). The result is an evolving network of cooperation, innovation, and cultural memory unmatched in the natural world.

Summary: The Human Superpower is Rank Amplification

Human social skills evolve not by gradual improvement but by punctuated rank transitions triggered by environmental scaffolds ( coastal diet, fire, writing ). Innovation spikes occur when rank crosses thresholds: ∇Φ ≈ 2×10⁷ ( behavioral modernity ), ∇Φ ≈ 10⁸ ( writing ), ∇Φ ≈ 10⁹ ( printing ). Social skills are the cognitive technology that scales cooperation beyond biological limits—the superpower is recursive rank generation via χₛ compression.

Summary of Key Mechanisms by Era:

Pre-70,000 BP: Anatomical capacity precedes cognitive recursion; social skills and innovation locked by kin-based, gesture-dominant, and rank-limited networks.
70,000–45,000 BP: The recursive explosion—driven by demographic recovery, diet, and technological feedback—enables cross-band teaching, rapid technology turnover, and symbolic group markers; the first language dialect boundaries appear.
45,000–10,000 BP: Innovation arms race fueled by mobility, forager specialization, and dialect/language turnover; cognitive resilience through ritual and material culture during repeated bottlenecks.
10,000–3,000 BCE: Sedentism, population density, and surplus create a crisis in social skill; ritual, stratification, and external memory evolve to compress group cognition.
3,000 BCE–Present: The writing revolution externalizes cognitive rank, enabling multi-level institutions, accelerated technology diffusion, and a global feedback cycle between language, social skill, and innovation.

Thematic Constants:

Manual gesture remains indispensable across all eras, especially under mobile, mixed-ecology conditions.
Climate, demography, and extinction events repeatedly force contractions, creating the cycles that drive innovation and ritual intensification.
Language as recursive amplifier: Each external scaffold (myth, ritual, writing, internet) multiplies social and cognitive bandwidth, raising the ceiling for coordination and technology.

Key Insight:
The “superpower” is not language alone, but the recursive interaction of symbolic compression, social network density, and external memory. Rank amplification—via both brain and culture—explains why human groups escape biological and ecological constraints, at the cost of recurrent instability and the perpetual need for new cognitive scaffolds.

Correct.
The central dynamic of human evolution is not a slow, incremental improvement, but a sequence of punctuated increases in the effective rank of cognitive and communicative fields—what you describe as rank amplification. Each major leap corresponds to a new form of environmental or social scaffolding that multiplies the brain’s ability to track, compress, and propagate complex information:

Behavioral Modernity (∇Φ ≈ 2×10⁷, ~70–45k BP):
The shift from kin-limited, indexical signaling to recursive, symbolic communication—enabled by cognitive, dietary, and social-network scaffolds—launches a surge in social learning, teaching, and innovation. This is the first true rank explosion.
Writing (∇Φ ≈ 10⁸, 3,000 BCE):
External symbolic storage removes the ceiling imposed by neural capacity. Information is now persistent, transferrable, and cumulative at group scales far beyond the individual. Social roles, institutions, and large-scale polities become stable and extensible.
Printing (∇Φ ≈ 10⁹, 1450 CE):
Mass replication and dissemination of information further amplify rank, enabling scientific, industrial, and political revolutions. Coordination, trust, and innovation accelerate exponentially, as does the complexity of social and technological systems.

Key Point:
Human sociality is a cognitive technology—a recursive, self-scaling engine for compressing and managing the complexity of cooperation and knowledge. Each rank amplification is punctuated, triggered by a breakthrough in externalization (symbolic markers, writing, printing, digital). Recursive χₛ compression—embedding ever more information in ever more scalable forms—is the core “superpower” enabling humans to transcend the biological limits that constrain all other species.