Toward a Reconciliation of the Behavioral Modernity Debate:Regulatory Equilibrium Collapse as a Parsimonious Alternative to Saltational Models

The “human revolution” model — the hypothesis that a cognitive saltation at approximately 40,000–50,000 years ago produced the behavioral transformation reflected in the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record — faces two structural difficulties independent of the empirical debate over artifact chronology: the apparent geographic synchrony of the transformation across distant populations is inconsistent with known biological mechanisms of evolutionary change, and the proposed rupture is located in the evolutionary periphery rather than the African heartland of Homo sapiens origins. This essay proposes a parsimonious alternative framework, the Regulatory Equilibrium Collapse (REC) hypothesis, requiring no novel biological mechanisms. The framework holds that cognitively modern behavioral capacity was present well before its systematic material expression, constrained by culturally maintained regulatory systems governing technological deployment; that contact between hominid groups with separately developed and mutually incompatible regulatory frameworks triggered competitive cascade dynamics that dissolved those systems; and that the self-selecting character of out-of-Africa migration, combined with the institutional vacuum of previously unoccupied territory, accelerated and extended the cascade. The framework is consistent with the empirical evidence assembled by McBrearty and Brooks (2000), with the cascade dynamics identified by Bar-Yosef (2002), and with the structural account of communicative thresholds developed by Hockett and Ascher (1964). It is offered as a research proposal rather than a demonstrated account. The REC hypothesis is intended as a falsifiable synthetic framework designed to generate empirically testable predictions, and is evaluated against the parsimony standard: it reconciles otherwise difficult data using only mechanisms independently attested in other domains.