V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An Earthtwinian Genesis Synthesis

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

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)

Tattersall, Ian. Once We Were Not Alone. Scientific American. January, 2000. Recent views on the origins of Homo Sapiens. Until some 150,000 years ago Africa was populated by other hominids. The winner gained advantage by symbolic thought made possible through language.

Tattersall, Ian. The Monkey in the Mirror. New York: Harcourt, 2001. The curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History sees the acquisition of language and symbolic art as the prime cognitive abilities that distinguish the human presence. But ascribing to the old materialist mindset, Tattersall takes a very dour view saying that nature never intended human beings, people are just here as “accidental tourists.”

Tibayrenc, Michel and Francisco Ayala, eds. On Human Nature: Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2016. The 46 chapter compendium edited by the French research physician and the UC Irvine philosophical biologist spans three parts: Biological Basis of Human Diversity, Psychology, Behavior and Society, and Ethics, Politics and Religious Considerations. An Abstract for the lead chapter The Advent of Biological Evolution and Humankind by Ayala and Spanish philosopher Camilo Cela Conde is below. Some other titles are The Human Family: Evolutionary Origins and Adaptive Significance, Human Life History Evolution, Hominins: Context, Origins, and Taxic Diversity, Gene-Culture Models for the Evolution of Altruistic Teaching, Human Sociology and Group Selection Theory, and Universal Humanity, Religious Particularity, and Scientific Reductionism. A broad range is covered but still sans any sense of a greater phenomenal genesis from which they spring form and exemplify. In this absence, the current major evolutionary emergent transition to a prodigious personsphere learning on her/his own is further removed.

The human lineage appeared around 7 Ma as the sister group of chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Thus, humans and chimpanzees are very similar, genetically speaking, though they differ in many conspicuous phenotypic, functional, and adaptive traits. What was the cause of the appearance of humanity? Is it related to hazardous episodes? Or, is it the result of a necessity due to the fact that our nature endows a somehow adaptive superior capacity that justifies the human prevalence among all primates? In this chapter we examine the components of chance and necessity in biological evolution. We will present the distinctive features of the human lineage and discuss to what extent the synapomorphic trait shared by the whole lineage of humans—bipedalism—can be considered a product of adaptive selection or random events. Finally, we introduce the current possibilities of analysis to characterize the origin of the derived features of Homo sapiens. (Abstract: The Advent of Biological Evolution and Humankind: Chance and Necessity? By C. J. Cela-Conde and F. J. Ayala)

Timmermann, Axel, et al. Past climate change effects on human evolution. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 5/701, 2024. IBS Center for Climate Physics, South Korea, University of Naples and University of Florence researchers evaluate how changing paleontological environs could have strongly influenced, impeded or enhanced hominin migrations and relarive survival.

The genus Homo evolved during the Pleistocene epoch of gradual cooling and amplification of glacial cycles which influenced early human survival, adaptation and evolution in complex ways. Humans emerged in dry grassland and shrubland when average climate conditions were warm but as global climate cooled down, human species had to adapt to new local conditions, as indicated in the archaeological record. Limited dispersal ability and narrow ecological preferences were predominant, whereas cultural innovations and wider ecological niches opened for later species. Yet, despite their growing ecological versatility, all species but one eventually went extinct. (Excerpt)

Tomasello, Michael. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. As the publisher notes next, after two decades of field and laboratory research, the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with many colleagues, presents a fully developed theory of how peoples came to our cognitive abilities to do this. The passage from ape primates to hominids to homo sapiens can be best tracked and understood by degrees of cooperation and collaboration. With the chimpanzees, a phase of “individual intentionality” came to replace competition alone with informed communication. As groups evolved to the lineages of early man, a “joint intentionality” took precedent by way of “second-person thinking,” a communal discourse whence members becomes aware of each other’s mind and thought.

In spiral turn, with human beings a stage of “shared, collective intentionality” arises. Beyond genetic nuance, an increasing communal coherence and reciprocity distinguishes and propels our prolific, expansive, technological societies. As the fourth quote cites, this species trajectory is quite similar to the pace and sequence by which each child advances. So a long episode of evolving from me vs. me to We and me for mutual benefit, is now well defined and qunatified. With a major transition to a planetary progeny is lately underway, how might a worldwise “shared, collective cognition” be able reach its own salutary knowledge and intention in time to save us?

In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own. (He) argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners.

Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction. (Publisher)

In their magisterial survey of life on planet earth, (John) Maynard-Smith and (Eors) Szathmary (1995) identified eight major transitions in the evolution of complexity of living things, for example, the emergence of chromosomes, the emergence of multicellular organisms, and the emergence of sexual reproduction. Astoundingly, in each case the transition was characterized by the same two fundamental processes. First, in each case there emerged some new form of cooperation with interdependence: “Entities that were capable of independent replication before the transition can replicate only as part of a larger whole after it” (6). Second, in each case this new form of cooperation was made possible by a concomitant new form of communication: “change in the method of information transmission” (6). (32)

There can be no doubt that the last common ancestor to humans and other primates engaged in individual thinking in pursuit of individual goals, mostly in order to compete with groupmates for valued resources. Along the way, they attended to situations relevant to those goals. Early human individuals – in response to a changing feeding ecology – then began to join together with other individuals dyadically in pursuit of joint goals, and they jointly amended to situations relevant to that joint goal. Each participant in the collaboration had her own individual role and her own individual perspective on the situation as part of the interactive unit. This dual-level structure – simultaneous jointness and individuality – is the defining structure of what we are calling “joint intentionality,” and it is foundational for all subsequent manifestations of human shared intentionality. (78)

First, although ontogeny does not have to recapitulate phylogeny, in the current case the relation between joint intentionality and collective intentionality is partly logical – one must have some skills for coordinating with other individuals before coordinating with the group – and so the ontogenetic ordering is basically the same as our hypothesized phylogenetic ordering. (144)

Tomasello, Michael. The Origins of Morality. Scientific American. September, 2018. The former director of the MPI Evolutionary Anthropology and prolific author has now moved back to alma mater Duke University. In a topical issue on The Science of Being Human, he summarizes his 2016 work A Natural History of Morality which cites reciprocal interdependence as the social quality which most facilitated our Homo sapiens advent. By similar concepts to Kevin Laland in this issue (above), a self-reinforcing collaborative intelligence and cooperation serves a relative group cohesion and knowledge. In a full page graphic, an evolutionary course proceeds from intentionality by Individual primates (me) to Joint hominids (We) onto a beneficial Shared cultural phase (US). A salutary lesson may then accrue, as the quote notes. We and me are seen as natural complements, and We should take precedence over me. However, one wonders, might these anthropological insights transfer and be availed by public politics where they are locked in brutal conflict. See also Profile of Michael Tomasello and How Children Come to Understand False Beliefs: A Shared Intentionality Account in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (115/34, 2018).

The essence of this account is thus a kind of “we is greater than me” Psychological orientation, which gives moral notions their special of legitimacy in personal decision making. (75) But if we are to solve our largest challenges as a species, which threaten all human societies alike, we had best be prepared to think of all of humanity as a “we.” (75)

Tomasello, Michael and Esther Herrmann. Ape and Human Cognition: What’s the Difference? Current Directions in Psychological Science. 19/1, 2010. Max Planck Institute evolutionary anthropologists first aver our deep mental continuity with primate ancestors. What distinguishes us however is a social culture so intensely interlinked as to take on a communal, organism-like guise capable of its own cerebral intention.

Humans share the vast majority of their cognitive skills with other great apes. In addition, however, humans have also evolved a unique sense of cognitive skills and motivations – collectively referred to as shared intentionality – for living collaboratively, learning socially, and exchanging information in cultural groups. (3) Virtually all of humans’ highest cognitive achievements are not the work of individuals acting alone but rather of individuals collaborating in groups. (5)

Tomasello, Michael and Hannes Rakoczy. What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language. 18/2, 2003. From the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a hypothesis that distinctive human faculties are not due just to brain size but arise from the complex cultural milieu in which homo sapiens became immersed. This theory is based on studies of how children proceed in their first four years from an infant self-emphasis to recognizing others as mental agents and onto a collective social intentionality. The tacit assumption is that a child repeats the same developmental stages as the human species passed through.

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