THE ADAM PARADOX HYPOTHESIS: A Seventeen-Concept Architectural Model for the Emergence of Purpose-Oriented Human Cognition

ABSTRACT Despite over a century of research, the delayed yet near-synchronous emergence of symbolic, normative, and future-oriented cognition in Homo sapiens remains poorly explained by gradualist evolutionary models. Anatomically modern humans appear by ~315 kya, yet durable symbolic systems stabilize only after ~70 kya, producing a long, lineage-wide dissociation between biological readiness and cognitive expression. This preprint advances the Adam Paradox Hypothesis (APH), a solution-oriented, lineage-level architectural framework that models human cognition as a state-dependent system characterized by early architectural instantiation, prolonged functional latency, and threshold-dependent global activation. Rather than proposing new biological mutations, demographic triggers, or regional cultural drivers, APH specifies how internal architectural coherence can account for the abrupt, integrated, and near-global stabilization of symbolic cognition observed in the Late Pleistocene. Version 1.3 clarifies APH as an explanatorily sufficient architectural framework without asserting causal closure. It explicitly distinguishes architectural explanation from claims about ultimate causation, strengthens the mapping between architectural claims and empirical proxies, and makes all core predictions and falsification criteria explicit. The framework is intended for interdisciplinary evaluation across paleoanthropology, archaeology, population genomics, cognitive science, and systems theory. This preprint is also available via OSF: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HAC7