Regulatory Equilibrium as Demonstrated Capacity: Comparative Evidence Against the Saltation Model's Necessary Premise Eight Cases

The cognitive saltation model of behavioral modernity rests on a necessary inferential premise: that long-term technological stability in the archaeological record implies cognitive limitation in the populations producing it. Without this premise, the pre-Upper Paleolithic pattern of stasis does not constitute evidence for cognitive discontinuity. This paper argues that the premise is not merely logically unnecessary but observationally refuted — and refuted not once but across eight independent cases drawn from living populations, historical expansion records, ecological outcomes, and documented institutional practices. The eight cases divide into three evidential categories. Four instantiate the core REC mechanism directly: the Sentinelese demonstrate regulatory equilibrium maintained synchronically under contact pressure; the Arctic expansion of Paleo-Eskimo and Thule populations demonstrates it carried diachronically into new territory with predicted ecological consequences; Polynesian linguistic conservatism demonstrates institutionally governed transmission of meaning-coordination infrastructure across ten million square kilometres without corrective contact for five centuries; and Papua New Guinea demonstrates sophisticated inter-group regulatory coordination maintained across 850 mutually unintelligible languages without common language, writing, or state. Two provide controlled ecological comparisons: Tasmania demonstrates regulatory calibration to a generous environment misread as technological regression; Rapa Nui demonstrates regulatory adaptation to severe ecological degradation followed by contact-zone institutional destruction, not internal collapse. Two address the specific question of contact-zone dynamics: the Polynesian non-settlement of the Americas demonstrates bounded exchange as the stable equilibrium between capable non-peaceful populations without decisive asymmetric advantage; and the African continental population reserve explains why pre-cascade regulatory recovery was possible and why its absence at the current scale of the problem is structurally novel. No single case demonstrates that REC is correct. Together they demonstrate that every mechanism REC proposes exists, operates in cognitively modern humans, and produces the predicted behavioral and ecological signatures. The saltation model's necessary premise is an extraordinary claim that has been treated as a default assumption. It is neither.