There is a quantum leap between earlier human artifacts and the paleolithic cave paintings of southwestern France. Jared Diamond has called Great Leap Forward whatever progress allowed this advance in human cognition and societal prowess. Tom Zimmerman spelled out to me a theory for it derived from Computer Theology.
Computer Theology presents the convergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the beginning of the 1990's in a way that Tom compared to the Great Leap Forward. Computer Theology explains in details how the technology behind the World Wide Web dates back to the 1960's via clearly delineated changes, and the Internet also traces back to its predecessor of the 1970's, the Arpanet, and in fact even to the end of the 1960's.
Tom observed that the combination of two progress streams created a sudden and explosive progress that translated very rapidly into the recursive formation of digital societies in and on the worldwide network. That leads to the hypothesis that the two streams that Computer Theology associates with religion, creative ecstasy and conservative rituals, may be the source of similar progress by human beings in the form of religion enabling the constitution of larger and larger groups through shared trust infrastructures.
What I found particularly interesting is that in this perspective there is no need to invoke a mutation. If the convergence of two innovative streams is clearly at the source of the explosive growth of digital networks, perhaps the same cause was at the origin of our own explosive growth.
Jared Diamond (1999). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-3930613-1-0.
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