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View submission: We're back! And We've Brought Updates
As mentioned, this is mostly (almost entirely) about making it easier for users to find decent content and for moderators to handle these sorts of questions.
Two considerations went into this.
The first is that these threads simply don't attract answers of value. With years of moderation experience here and at /r/AskHistorians, I know well that the questions least likely to attract invested experts are often those most likely to attract uninformed users who think they might have something to casually add. Even a recent thread like this[1], which *does* specify a time period and would therefore be allowed under the new rule, attracted many answers that were "just my two cents" or "I don't know about the paleolithic, but..."
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/13zrptx/where_did_paleolithic_humans_sitsleep/
The second is that most engagement on such posts, especially ones asking about hunter-gatherers or ancient humans without clarification, is knowledgeable users prompting the questioner if they can narrow their question down or explaining that, no, "biologically innate" is not worth asking about. This is tiresome clutter. Pushing it "backstage" saves respondents energy for actually responding and prevents further clutter from building in thread.
The expectation, of course, is that people will be willing to rephrase their question a little bit. If a moderator suggests rephrasing "When did religion begin?" into "What's the earliest evidence for belief in the supernatural?" and a user can't be bothered to follow through, that's on them. It doesn't require all that much anthropological knowledge to specify a continent or country that you are interested in learning about.
It's often the case though that people *do* have something specific in mind when they ask broad questions but feel that they have to ask it in "anthropology speak." They'll have a NatGeo article about the Hadza in their head, but rather than ask "How do communities in Southeast Africa celebrate marriage?" they'll elevate to ask about general human patterns, because that's the public image of what anthropology studies.
There's nothing here!