Behavioral modernity is a term used in anthropology and archeology to refer to an important milestone in the evolution of humans. It is a loosely defined list of traits that distinguish humans and their recent ancestors from both living primates and various fossil hominids. It is the point at which homo sapiens began to demonstrate its reliance on abstract thought and to express cultural creativity. As of 2004, many date its emergence to between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago, and place its origins in Africa (in opposition to earlier claims of its European origins).
Classic evidence of behavioral modernity includes:
finely made stone and bone tools,
evidence of long-distance exchange or barter among groups,
A more terse definition of the evidence is the behavioral B's: blades, beads, burials, bone toolmaking, and beautiful. [1] (http://williamcalvin.com/BHM/ch9.htm)
The evolution into anatomically modern humans, particularly in brainanatomy, is mostly believed to be a precursor for behavioral modernity and is generally believed to predate it by tens of thousands of years.
The author shows how the institutionalization of central modes of Western rationality --- found in capitalism, industrialization, science, science-based technology, bureaucracy, the rule of law, the social and behavioral sciences --- has created a culturally and historically unique form of collective life: advanced industrial society.
Indicative of this development is the nature and meaning of the so-called innovative society itself, where rationality is increasingly seen to repose in institutions and organized structures rather than in individuals.
Critiques the tendency to treat modernity as an integrated and coherent whole, and suggests that the real world presents far stranger and more unexpected combinations of these elements than are dreamt of in modernist and postmodernist philosophies."]
Modernity may be considered "marked and defined by an obsession with 'evidence'", visuality, and visibility (Leppert 2004, p.19).
Modernity is often characterized by comparing modern societies to premodern or postmodern ones, and the understanding of those non-modern social statuses is, again, far from a settled issue.
This is especially the case when a modern society is compared with premodern societies, in which the family and social class one is born into shapes one's lifecourse to a greater extent.
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