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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

Roberts, Patrick and Brian Stewart. Defining the “Generalist Specialist” Niche for Pleistocene Homo Sapiens.. Nature Human Behavior. 2.542, 2018. . MPI Science of Human History and University of Michigan paleo-anthropologists suggest ways that a reciprocal combination of mental attention to detail, along with a capacity for wider scene views could explain why our (genius) genus arose and won out from an array of other candidates.

Definitions of our species as unique within the hominin clade have cited capacities for symbolism, language, social networking, technological competence and cognitive development. Recent thought has been turned towards humans’ unique ecological plasticity. Here, we review the growing archaeological and palaeo-environmental datasets relating to the Middle–Late Pleistocene (300–12 thousand years ago) dispersal of our species within and beyond Africa. We argue, in comparison with other members of the genus Homo, that our species developed a new ecological niche, that of a ‘generalist specialist’. Not only could a diversity of environments be occupied and utilized, but this mentality aided adaptations to some environmental extremes. (Abstract)

Roux, Valentine. A Dynamic Systems Framework for Studying Technological Change. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 10/1, 2003. The emergence of the potter’s wheel in the Southern Levant can be modeled as “a complex set of interactions among internal components” which self-organize over time into emergent social patterns.

Sarmiento, Esteban, et al. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. A plethora of recent fossil finds, such as the petite homo floresiensis, is radically expanding the hominid family tree, of which this collaborative volume presents a lucid illustrated update. Out of the earliest African hominids some eight million years ago to many interim stages from sahelanthropus to neanderthalensis has appeared gracile, communal, loquacious homo sapiens. As our worldwide cerebral phenomenon can lately contemplate such past visages, the question is begged as to whom we individually and collectively are, what future personage and mission do we bear, what and whom is it for.

Scerri, Eleanor, et al. Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter? Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Online July, 2018. A 23 member international collaboration from the UK, Germany, South Korea, the USA, France, Norway, and Portugal including Brenna Henn, Chris Stringer, and Philipp Gunz achieve a latest synthesis of archeological fossils and genetic sequencings as our Earthropo sapiens project to learn how we peoples came to be proceeds apace. From skull casings, dentures, bones, stone tools, along with DNA scrapings and other evidence from inter-bred “ancient hominins” groupings, a quantified, albeit variegated reconstruction is much underway. For example, glossary terms include allele-frequency spectrum, effective population sizes, pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent, panmixia and refugia. Questions then arise: whom are me + We latecomers that can retrospectively do this, what is life’s long gestation trying to self-realize, what palliative, procreative Earthian future could it portend?

We challenge the view that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved within a single population and/or region of Africa. The chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils suggest that morphologically varied populations pertaining to the H. sapiens clade lived throughout Africa. Similarly, the African archaeological record demonstrates the polycentric origin and persistence of regionally distinct Pleistocene material culture in a variety of paleoecological settings. Genetic studies also indicate that present-day population structure within Africa extends to deep times, paralleling a paleoenvironmental record of shifting and fractured habitable zones. We argue that these fields support an emerging view of a highly structured African prehistory that should be considered in human evolutionary inferences, prompting new interpretations, questions, and interdisciplinary research directions. (Abstract)

Schwartz, Jeffrey, ed. Rethinking Human Evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. A Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology edition from a September 2015 Konrad Lorenz Institute workshop on how the latest evidence steadily coming serves to revise the prior trajectories. Chapter authors include Ian Tattersall, Claudine Cohen, Peter Waddell and Markus Bastir.

Shennan, Stephen. Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. A contribution to an evolutionary context for the full reconstruction of human origins. Two approaches are emphasized: ‘behavioral ecology’ which studies evolving behavior and ‘dual inheritance theory’ as the formation of a cultural genetic code.

Shriner, Daniel, et al. Ancient Human Migration after Out-of-Africa. Nature Scientific Reports. 6/26565, 2016. With Fasil Tekola-Ayele, Adebowale Adeyemo and Charles Rotimi, National Human Genome Research Institute, Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health researchers employ the latest synthesis of network science, genetic sequencing techniques and computational analysis to finesse our worldwide retrospective ancestry project. Whomever then is this emergent Anthropo sapiens personsphere that can proceed to wholly quantify for whence me and We all arose? Why is an organic universe doing this by way of valiant Earthlings, toward what great discovery and purpose?

The serial founder model of modern human origins predicts that the phylogeny of ancestries exhibits bifurcating, tree-like behavior. Here, we tested this prediction using three methods designed to investigate gene flow in autosome-wide genotype data from 3,528 unrelated individuals from 163 global samples. Specifically, we investigated whether Cushitic ancestry has an East African or Middle Eastern origin. We found evidence for non-tree-like behavior in the form of four migration events. First, we found that Cushitic ancestry is a mixture of ancestries closely related to Arabian ancestry and Nilo-Saharan or Omotic ancestry. We found evidence for additional migration events in the histories of: 1) Indian and Arabian ancestries, 2) Kalash ancestry, and 3) Native American and Northern European ancestries. These findings, based on analysis of ancestry of present-day humans, reveal migration in the distant past and provide new insights into human history. (Abstract)

Shriner, Daniel, et al. Genome-Wide Genotype and Sequence-Based Reconstruction of the 140,000 Year History of Modern Human Ancestry. Nature Scientific Reports. 4/6055, 2014. A National Human Genome Research Institute, Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health, team reports that these latest techniques capabilities can provide a unique, 21st century approach to understand how we peoples came to evolve and cover the earth.

We investigated ancestry of 3,528 modern humans from 163 samples. We identified 19 ancestral components, with 94.4% of individuals showing mixed ancestry. After using whole genome sequences to correct for ascertainment biases in genome-wide genotype data, we dated the oldest divergence event to 140,000 years ago. We detected an Out-of-Africa migration 100,000–87,000 years ago, leading to peoples of the Americas, east and north Asia, and Oceania, followed by another migration 61,000–44,000 years ago, leading to peoples of the Caucasus, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia. We dated eight divergence events to 33,000–20,000 years ago, coincident with the Last Glacial Maximum. We refined understanding of the ancestry of several ethno-linguistic groups, including African Americans, Ethiopians, the Kalash, Latin Americans, Mozabites, Pygmies, and Uygurs, as well as the CEU sample. Ubiquity of mixed ancestry emphasizes the importance of accounting for ancestry in history, forensics, and health. (Abstract)

Smith, Daniel, et al. Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Storytelling. Nature Communications. 8/1853, 2017. A thirteen member effort from the University College London, Bristol Zoological Society, Cambridge University, and Lyceum of the Philippines University including Ruth Mace and Lucio Vinicius provide a unique appreciation of group narrations as they found to support reciprocal community welfare. See also Andrea Migliano for a companion paper by this group. But I add, as Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme’s 1992 The Universe Story, (for which I was a reader at TBs request), tried to broach, into these later 2010s our worldwide human/Earth community is terminally bereft of any sensible story which could serve this purpose and provide common global guidance.

From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism. These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours can evolve via individual-level selection. (Abstract excerpts)

Stade, Cory and Clive Gamble. In Three Minds: Extending Cognitive Archaeology with the Social Brain. Overmann, Karenleigh and Frederick Coolidge, eds. Squeezing Minds from Stones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. In this major volume reviewed herein, University of Southampton scholars (search CG) propose a triune cerebral emphasis of Rational, Experiential, and Relational functions. Altogether, they serve a materially based communal cognition (which might seen as left, right, and whole brain/mind phases). By another view, a member/group reciprocity, in some early ubuntu way, quite aids sustenance and survival.

Stringer, Chris and Peter Andrews. The Complete World of Human Evolution. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. London Natural History Museum curators of human origins achieve an illustrated chronicle based on the latest reconstructions of how modern homo sapiens long came to evolve. Now a revised, updated edition, a premier volume about the multiple hominids and lineages that preceded us.

Human domination of the earth is now so complete that it is easy to forget how recently our role in the history of the planet began. The earliest apes evolved around twenty million years ago, yet Homo sapiens has existed for a mere 160,000 years. In the intervening period, dozens of species of early ape and human have lived and died out, leaving behind the fossilized remains that have helped to make the detailed picture of our evolution revealed here. Since this book was first published in 2005 there have been exciting new developments in the story of ape and human evolution, and the authors take account of them in this revised edition. The big gap in the fossil record in Africa is beginning to be filled with the discovery of several new species of apes in Kenya and Ethiopia that date from ten to nine million years ago. There are new discoveries of Australopithecus, updates on the dating of hominin sites, results of new DNA analyses, and much more. (Publisher)

Tattersall, Ian. An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews. Vol. 3/99, 2008. This is an online journal of the Comparative Cognition Society, as noted below, at http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/ where the article in PDF text can be accessed. We reprint the full Abstract next to convey its content.

Human beings are unique in their possession of language and symbolic consciousness. Yet there is no doubt that modern Homo sapiens is descended from a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic ancestor. How might this extraordinary transition have occurred? Slow fine-tuning over the eons is not the answer: the apparent steadiness in hominid brain enlargement over the past two myr is probably an artifact of inadequate systematics, while behavioral innovation was highly episodic in human evolution, and nonsynchronic with anatomical innovation. Evidence for expression of symbolic behaviors appears only very late – substantially after Homo sapiens had arrived as an anatomical entity. Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that “exapted” the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be “discovered” culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitions having given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for “adaptedness” in modern human behaviors. (99)

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