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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

Boehm, Christopher. Interactions of Culture and Natural Selection among Pleistocene Hunters. Levinson, Stephen and Pierre Jaisson, eds. Evolution and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. On the initial occasion of an egalitarian social morality by a precarious meld of altruistic tendencies along with punitive sanction and positive reward. Upon reflection, from an organically developing universe arises a natural ethics that might finally leaven and guide an increasingly complex, yet quite violent world civilization.

Boughner, Julia, and Campbell Rolian, eds. Developmental Approaches to Human Evolution. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Wherein the evo-devo reunion is expanded to a vital, consequent “anthropo” phase. A Foreword by Gunter Wagner is followed by chapters such as Chondrocranial Growth, Developmental Integration and Evolvability in the Human Skull by Neus Martinez-Abadias, et al, Origin, Development, and Evolution of Primate Muscles by Rui Diogo and Bernard Wood, Evolving the Developmental Cortex by Christine Charvet and Barbara Finlay (search), and Growing Up Fast, Maturing Slowly: The Evolution of a Uniquely Modern Human Pattern of Brain Development by Philipp Gunz. The Evolutionary Biology of Human Neurodevelopment: Evo-Neuro-Devo Comes of Age by Bernard Crespi (search) and Emma Leach goes on to report how the quality of neural connectivity affect one’s mental state whence autism is due to not enough while schizophrenics have too many.

Developmental Approaches to Human Evolution encapsulates the current state of evolutionary developmental anthropology. This emerging scientific field applies tools and approaches from modern developmental biology to understand the role of genetic and developmental processes in driving morphological and cognitive evolution in humans, non-human primates and in the laboratory organisms used to model these changes.

Bowles, Samuel, et al. The Co-evolution of Individual Behaviors and Social Institutions. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 223/2, 2003. A computer simulation which uses an agent-based model indicates an inherent tendency toward altruistic, cooperative societies that can balance group-benefits with fitness costs to members.

Our simulations have shown that if group-level institutions implementing resource sharing or positive assortation within groups are free to evolve, group-level selection processes support the co-evolution of group-beneficial individual behaviors along with these institutions, even where these institutions impose significant costs on the groups adopting them. (146)

Brent, Lauren, et al. Social Network Analysis in the Study of Nonhuman Primates: A Historical Perspective. American Journal of Primatology. 73/8, 2011. In an age of Facebook, for a special issue on Social Networks in Primates, Brent, Duke University, cognitive neuroscience, Julia Lehmann, Roehampton University, London, evolutionary anthropology, and Gabriel Ramos-Fernández, CIIDIR Unidad Oaxaca, primatology, give an overview of findings that ape and monkey genera are quite immersed in and sustained by constant, reciprocal conversation. Today, by means of worldwide computer sophistication, as “Social Network Modeling: The Study of Group Scale Phenomena in Primates” by Armand Jacobs and Odile Petit reports, the presence of similar communal discourses across the animal kingdoms can be quantified.

Advances over the last 15 years have made social network analysis (SNA) a powerful tool for the study of nonhuman primate social behavior. Although many SNA-based techniques have been only very recently adopted in primatological research, others have been commonly used by primatologists for decades. The roots of SNA also stem from some of the same conceptual frameworks as the majority of nonhuman primate behavioral research. The rapid development of SNA in recent years has led to questions within the primatological community of where and how SNA fits within this field. We aim to address these questions by providing an overview of the historical relationship between SNA and the study of nonhuman primates. We begin with a brief history of the development of SNA, followed by a detailed description of the network-based visualization techniques, analytical methods and conceptual frameworks which have been employed by primatologists since as early as the 1960s. We also introduce some of the latest advances to SNA, thereby demonstrating that this approach contains novel tools for the study of nonhuman primate social behavior which may be used to shed light on questions that cannot be addressed fully using more conventional methods. (Abstract, 720)

Bromage, Timothy and Friedemann Schrenk, eds. African Biogeography, Climate Change and Human Evolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. An interdisciplinary survey of worldwide radiations over the past 8 million years from which modern humans arise. A typical paper is “The Autocatalytic Nature of Hominid Evolution in African Plio-Pleistocene Environments.”

Buskes, Chris. The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution. Philosophies. 4/1, 2019. With Keywords of Cultural evolution; cumulative culture; gene–culture coevolution; dual inheritance; universal Darwinism; and memetics, a Radboud University, Netherlands scholar extols the unique way that our homo sapience has achieved a collective knowledge capacity and external informed repertoire. If we might reflect on this retrospect vantage, it seems to strongly suggest the presence of a worldwise Earthcyclopedic accumulation, which a main surmise and aim of this site is to represent, document and display. See also How Humans Cooperate by R. Blanton and L. Fargher (2016, search) for another perception.

This article tries to shed light on the mystery of human culture. Human beings are the only extant species with cumulative, evolving cultures. Many animal species do have cultural traditions in the form of socially transmitted practices but they typically lack cumulative culture. Thanks to their accumulated knowledge and techniques our early ancestors were able to leave their cradle in Africa and swarm out across the planet, adjusting themselves to a whole range of new environments. In order to explain this mystery I won’t appeal to the major advances in human evolution like walking upright, crafting stone tools and controlling fire because that would be question begging. Instead I try to unearth the mechanisms that caused those evolutionary turning points to occur in the first place. It seems that unlike other animals, humans are predisposed to acquire, store and transmit cultural information in such ways that our cultures can genuinely evolve. (Abstract)

Cappellini, Enrico, et al. Ancient Biomolecules and Evolutionary Inference. Annual Review of Biochemistry. Vol. 87, 2018. An 18 member team from Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom, led by the University of Copenhagen with Eske Willerslev, survey this novel, collaborative facility to retrieve and sequence all manner of prior genetic material. After 20th century studies of fossil bones, this evidential accuracy via our long hereditary heritage revises and fills in an interbred and interwoven track from primates and hominins to modern homo sapiens. But we are just getting going they say – a deep time phylogenetics and lipidomics is projected to recover all of life’s flora and fauna evolution from its earliest rudiments.

Over the last decade, studies of ancient DNA, proteins, and lipids have revolutionized our understanding of evolutionary history. Researchers now successfully retrieve nucleotide and amino acid sequences, as well as lipid signatures, from progressively older samples, originating from geographic areas and depositional environments that, until recently, were regarded as hostile to long-term preservation of biomolecules. This progress has been made possible by continuous technical innovations in analytical methods, enhanced criteria for the selection of ancient samples, integrated experimental methods, and advanced computational approaches. Here, we discuss the history and current state of ancient biomolecule research, its applications to evolutionary inference, and future directions. (Abstract)

Carruthers, Peter and Andrew Chamberlain, eds. Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. How the ability to be aware of one’s thoughts (meta-cognition) is due to the convergent assembly of dedicated mental modules which first arose as evolutionary adaptations.

Cashdan, Elizabeth and Stephen Downes. Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Aggression. Human Nature. 23/1, 2012. A University of Utah anthropologist and a philosopher introduce a special issue on this fraught subject. Typical papers are “Intergroup Aggression in Chimpansees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers” by Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, and “Dead Certain: Confidence and Conservatism Predict Aggression in Simulated International Crisis Decision-Making” by Dominic Johnson, et al.

The papers in this volume present varying approaches to human aggression, each from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary studies of aggression collected here all pursue aspects of patterns of response to environmental circumstances and consider explicitly how those circumstances shape the costs and benefits of behaving aggressively. All the authors understand various aspects of aggression as evolved adaptations but none believe that this implies we are doomed to continued violence, but rather that variation in aggression has evolutionary roots. These papers reveal several similarities between human and nonhuman aggression, including our response to physical strength as an indicator of fighting ability, testosterone response to competition, a sensitivity to paternity, and baseline features of intergroup aggression in foragers and chimps. There is also one paper tackling the phylogeny of these traits. The many differences between human and nonhuman aggression are also pursued here. Topics here include the impact of modern weapons and extremes of wealth and power on both the costs and benefits of fighting, and the scale to which coercion can promote aggression that acts against a fighter’s own interests. Also the implications of large-scale human sociality are discussed. (Abstract, 1)

Cavanagh, William. Settlement Structure in Laconia and Attica at the End of the Archaic Period: The Fractal Dimension. American Journal of Archaeology. 113/3, 2009. The University of Nottingham archaeologist finds these city states of classical Greece to display a self-similar geometry across several scales. Whom then appears several millennia later to be able reconstruct and discover this universality?

Cepelewicz, Jordana. Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins. Quanta Magazine. August 30, 2019. A science writer reports the latest retrospective findings and revisions as ancient genome sequencing expands its reach and depth. As the Bard would say, Oh, what a tangled species web we have woven. The work of Joshua Akey at Princeton, Adam Siepel at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin, and others, with reference links, are drawn upon.

Chapais, Bernard. Primeval Kinship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. In this noted volume, the University of Montreal anthropologist takes up the cause of Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) to seek and discern “the deep structure of human societies.” Decades later, his working phrase of “reciprocal exogamy” for the common practice of intermarriage between clans or tribes, is revived anew. In this regard, it has gained support by the 2010 field project of Hill, Kim, et al, herein, which found that instead of primate and hominid groups based on extended kin relations, as long thought, siblings often move to neighbor troops, which lessens aggression between them. This breakthrough understanding receives careful exposition over 300 pages, a feature which served a familial affinity between tribes. For a general update with reviews, see Complex Kinship Patterns as Evolutionary Constructions, and the Origins of Sociocultural Universals in Current Anthropology (55/6, 2014).

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