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

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

Voorhees, Burton, et al. Identity, Kinship, and the Evolution of Cooperation. Current Anthropology. Online September, 2018. Senior psychological anthropologists BV Athabasca University, Alberta, Dwight Read UCLA and Liane Gabora University of British Columbia trace near and further social affinities to a personal self-reflective awareness, within and supported by, extended familial relations.

Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human. This paper presents a theory of cooperation that draws on social, cultural, and psychological aspects of human uniqueness for which current theories have little or no explanation. We propose that the evolution of human cooperative behavior required (1) a capacity for self-sustained, self-referential thought manifested as an integrated worldview, including a sense of identity and point of view, and (2) the cultural formation of kinship-based social organizational systems within which social identities can be established and transmitted through enculturation. Human cooperative behavior arose, we argue, through the acquisition of a culturally grounded social identity that included the expectation of cooperation among kin. (Abstract excerpt)

Whiten, Andrew, et al. Culture Evolves. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 366/938, 2011. Whiten, and Kevin Laland, University of St. Andrews, Robert Hinde, St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Chris Stringer, British Natural History Museum, introduce a special issue, per the lengthy abstract, wherein researchers testify that advantageous behavioral repertoires persist across the gamut of animal, hominid, and human phases. Typical nuggets are “From Fish to Fashion: Experimental and Theoretical Insights into the Evolution of Culture” by Laland, N. Atton, and M. Webster, “Social Learning and the Development of Individual and Group Behavior in Mammal Societies,” Alex Thornton and Tim Clutton-Brock, and Andrew Whiten’s “The Scope of Culture in Chimpanzees, Humans and Ancestral Apes.” The full 25 papers will be published as Culture Evolves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, here brought together to illustrate the scope of a burgeoning field of cultural evolution and to facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilization. Each approach emphasizes important linkages between culture and evolutionary biology rather than quarantining one from the other. Recent studies reveal that processes important in cultural transmission are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, with important implications for evolutionary theory. Recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments suggest previously unidentified continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like processes are identified, in part, through scientific methods borrowed from biology. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission. (Abstract, 938)

Williams, Blythe, et al. New Perspectives on Anthropoid Origins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107/4797, 2010. Evolutionary anthropologists survey the latest synthesis of fossil and DNA evidence to further reconstruct how we homo sapiens came to be. “Anthropoid” means precursor primates with broadly human-like features.

Adaptive shifts associated with human origins are brought to light as we examine the human fossil record and study our own genome and that of our closest ape relatives. However, the more ancient roots of many human characteristics are revealed through the study of a broader array of living anthropoids and the increasingly dense fossil record of the earliest anthropoid radiations. Genomic data and fossils of early primates in Asia and Africa clarify relationships among the major clades of primates. Progress in comparative anatomy, genomics, and molecular biology point to key changes in sensory ecology and brain organization that ultimately set the stage for the emergence of the human lineage. (4797)

Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. A study of male-dominant, violent chimpanzee society and its evolutionary linkage to human behavior. This is contrasted with the peaceful bonobos where female and male subvert aggression in an egalitarian society. As a consequence, the authors suggest we can now deliberately choose which path to take.

Wurzer, Gabriel, et al, eds. Agent-based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology. Berlin: Springer, 2015. The proceedings of a 2011 conference on Agents in Archaeology held at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. An extensive chapter Explaining the Past with ABM by Mark Lake, which can be downloaded from its Springer site, leads off and scopes out an application of complex systems science even to our inherently social hominid forebears.

Wynn, Thomas. Archaeology and Cognitive Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 25/3, 2002. Explorations into how archaeological studies can inform the evolutionary development of human thought, for example its timing sequence and the formation of spatial cognition abilities.

Wynn, Thomas and Frederick Coolidge, eds. Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. A University of Colorado anthropologist and a psychologist gather chapters such as The Origins of Visual Artistic Behavior, Material engagement and the Embodied Mind, and Bootstrapping Ordinal Thinking to scope out a field dubbed Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology, which is the title of the first chapter.

Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology explores hominin cognitive development by applying formal cognitive models to analyze prehistoric remains from the entire range of the Palaeolithic, from the earliest stone tools 3.3 million years ago to artistic developments that emerged 50,000 years ago. Several different cognitive models are presented, including expert cognition, information processing, material engagement theory, embodied/extended cognition, neuroaesthetics, visual resonance theory, theory of mind, and neuronal recycling. By examining archaeological remains, and thereby past activities and behavior, through the grounded lenses of these models, a mosaic pattern of human cognitive evolution emerges.

Yong, Ed. Our Hybrid Origins. New Scientist. July 30, 2011. A well researched report on revolutionary studies of human and hominid evolution due to novel capabilities to sequence both modern and prehuman genomes. Notable cases are the Neanderthal, their newly found cousin the Siberian Denisovans, and any such precursor for which suitable skeletal remains exist. As a result, we find that us human beings are a variegated conglomeration of genetic vestiges from our many ancestor lineages.

Humans (taxonomically Homo sapiens, Latin for "wise man" or "knowing man") are the only living species in the Homo genus of bipedal primates in Hominidae, the great ape family. The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic. (Wikipedia)

Zimmer, Carl. Ancient Human Relatives Buried their Dead in Caves, New Theory Claims. New York Times. June 5, 2023. A report on these latest findings attributed to a new Homo naledi sublineage as a much earlier occasion of this careful behavior. Previous notices only went back tens of thousands of years. Salient papers are Burials and engravings in a small-brained hominin, Homo naledi, from the late Pleistocene by Agustin Fuentes, et al and 41,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave System, South Africa by Lee Berger, et al, both in the Biorxiv site for June 5, 2023. In further regard Google a concurrent large Richard Leakey Memorial Conference held at Stony Brook University.

Zonker, Johannes, et al.. Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter–gatherers over the past 120 000 years. Royal Society Open Science. November, 2023. While the presence and benefits for any group of an accumulating social lore has been known for some time, this current entry by JZ and Nataša Djurdjevac Conrad, Zuse Institute, Berlin, and Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, University of Zurich can provide the first agent-based, networked, mathematic quantification, which also includes a mobility factor. The paper begins by laying out this scientific phase and then applies it to an actual spatial/temporal tribal exemplar. A third section concludes as a proven fact, that the long span of human history is indeed distinguished and motivated by an expansive. salutary knowledge repository. As the basis of this resource website, along with concepts such as a major individuality transition and global brain knowsphere, a worldwise Earthumanity cumulative culture could be another occasion.

• Humans have a unique capacity to innovate, transmit and rely on a complex, cumulative culture for survival. While prior work has popof the sum entirety ulations with regard to persistence, diversity and information, they have not yet explained their occurrence and distribution over an evolutionary trajectory. Here, we develop a spatial-temporal agent-based model to include environmentally driven changes in the size and dynamics of hunter–gatherer groups as they may affect the form, transmission and accumulation of a relative knowledge content. We validate our model using empirical data from Central Africa spanning 120 000 years. Our work can therefore offer important insights into the role of a foraging lifestyle on the evolution of cumulative culture. (Abstract)
•
Despite being less genetically diverse than all our Great Ape relatives, humans are able to inhabit every terrestrial habitat of the planet. This unique adaptive ability has been largely explained by our capacity to rely on cumulative culture for survival. Culture is a second inheritance system that parallels and interacts with the genetic system, generating most of human population diversity. Cultural variation and innovations accumulate in populations throughout time, allowing for complex cultural adaptations to evolve. (1)

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