(logo) Natural Genesis (logo text)
A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Genesis Vision
Learning Planet
Organic Universe
Earth Life Emerge
Genesis Future
Glossary
Recent Additions
Search
Submit

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

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

Crabtree, Stefani and Jennifer Dunne. Towards a Science of Archaeolcology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. August, 2022. A Utah State University environmentalist and the Santa Fe Institute research director propose and sketch an integral way to learn how our homo to anthropo sapient presence has impacted, for better or worse, many local environments.

We propose a novel field of research called ‘archaeoecology’ to study the past ~60, 000 years of interactions between humans and ecosystems as a way to better understand our human place within them. An archaeoecology view can integrate issues, data, and approaches from these aspects, as it broadly gathers recent and future studies.

Culotta, Elizabeth and Ann Gibbons. Aborigines and Eurasians Rode One Migration Wave. Science. 353/1352, 2016. A report on several linked research projects that avail the latest genetic and linguistic analytical techniques, along with how their integration achieves a new phase of reconstructive veracity. This note is paired with Solving Australia’s Language Puzzle by Michael Erard in the same issue, which draws on a concurrent paper in Nature A Genomic History of Aboriginal Australia (search Malaspinas). It is broadly evident that homo Sapiens flowed out of Africa some 60,000 years ago to populate the Earth, whereof an early wave was the Aboriginal peoples, just as their name and mythic lore avers. See also The Wanderers by AG in Science at 354/959, 2016.

Daems, Dries. On Complex Archaeologies: Conceptualizing Social Complexity and its Potential for Archaeology. Adaptive Behavior. Online February, 2019. A University of Leuven, Belgium anthropologist considers how this current mathematical approach is evident in and can help quantify early hominin groupings and their material cultures.

This article surveys a number of approaches in complex systems thinking and their relevance for applications in the field of archaeology. It focuses on the fundamental role of social interactions and information transmission as constituent elements for the development of organizational complexity on a community level. It is discussed how material surroundings – including architectural structures and objects – are used to shape and social interactions and practices. It is shown how complex structures develop through underlying mechanisms of change such as diversification, connectivity and standardization, and how these can be applied in archaeological case studies. (Abstract)

Dalton, Rex. Feel It in Your Bones. Nature. 440/1100, 2006. A news report on how the latest fossil finds are revising the course of hominid evolution.

Dannemann, Michael and Fernando Racimo. Something Old, Something Borrowed: Admixture and Adaptation in Human Evolution. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development. 53/1, 2018. MPI Evolutionary Anthropology and Centre for GeoGenetics, Denmark researchers introduce a topical issue on Genetics of Human Origins, edited by Brenna Henn and Lluis Quintani-Murci, about 2010s paleo-sequencing techniques whose veracity overtakes and revises the prior century of fossil bones by way of genetic authenticity. For example, see Leveraging GWAS for Complex Traits to Detect Signatures of Natural Selection in Humans by Jing Gao, et al, and Fine-tuning of Approximate Bayesian Computation for Human Population Genomics by Niall Cooke and Shigeki Nakagome.

The sequencing of ancient DNA from archaic humans — Neanderthals and Denisovans — has revealed that modern and archaic humans interbred during the Pleistocene. The field of human paleogenomics has now turned its attention towards understanding the nature of this genetic legacy in the gene pool of present-day humans. What did modern humans obtain from interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans? Can differences in phenotypes among present-day human populations be explained by archaic human introgression? Here, we review the recent literature characterizing introgressed DNA and the likely biological consequences for their modern human carriers. We focus particularly on archaic human haplotypes that were beneficial to modern humans as they expanded across the globe, and on ways to understand how populations harboring these haplotypes evolved over time. (Abstract excerpt)

De Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. The Emory University primatologist and author explains through example and reflection how much of human behavior is traceable to our simian forebears. In these primate studies, a survival benefit for cooperation is seen as strong as competition. A “bipolar” dichotomy is then set up between the peaceful, hedonistic Bonobos, whose extensive female networking keeps males in check, and the truculent Chimpanzees whose societies are beset by male violence within clans, including infanticide, and with other out-group chimps. De Waal draws obvious connections with human mores and proposes as a result a balance between capitalist self-interest and social welfare. In accord with historian William McNeill and others, a reconceived benign civilization ought to be founded on egalitarian groupings that the ascent to homo sapiens began with.

Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely the small-scale communities of our ancestors. (233)

de Waal, Franz, ed. Tree of Origin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. A report on primate precursors of human behavior and sociality as these evolutionary roots become increasingly accepted. Nurture rejoins nature around themes of ecological niche, reproductive mores, social cognition, group organization, and how these affect hominization.

Deacon, Terrence. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton, 1997. The unique cognitive capacities of homo sapiens occurred by an ensemble of evolved steps such as “laryngeal descent and syntactic complexity,” brain restructuring for speech, tool use and social group hunting, along with the effects of male provisioning, pair bonding, and mating contracts. This array of qualities facilitated the formation of increasingly rich symbolic representations. Altogether they composed the individually and collectively stored knowledge about early humans expanding, dynamic societal and environmental niche.

No matter what else various theorists might claim about the nature of consciousness, most begin by recognizing that to be conscious of something is to experience a representation of it. (448) Unmasking the source of the subjective experience behind human consciousness is less likely to demonstrate how mental processes can be eliminated from material explanations than to demonstrate how they are implicit in them. And this may help us to recognize that the universe isn’t, after all, the soulless, blindly spinning clockwork we fear we are a part of, but is, instead, nascent heart and mind. (464)

Dean, Lewis, et al. Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture. Science. 335/1114, 2012. In a newsworthy note, a British, French, and American team that includes Kevin Laland makes the case that the definitive quality which sets human persons apart from hominids and primates is the progressive achievement of a social repository of learned and transmitted knowledge. In the same issue is review, “Origins of Cumulative Culture,” by Robert Kurzban and Clark Barrett. Such an appreciation, as if people proceed apace to evolve, transition and emerge to a further organism-like group stage, now graces the literature, e.g. “Ratcheting up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of Cumulative Culture” by Claudia Tennie, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello in Philosophical Transactions of the royal Society B (364/2405, 2009) and “Adaptive Strategies for Cumulative Cultural Learning” by Michael Ehn and Kevin Laland in Journal of Theoretical Biology (Early View, February 2012).

The remarkable ecological and demographic success of humanity is largely attributed to our capacity for cumulative culture, with knowledge and technology accumulating over time, yet the social and cognitive capabilities that have enabled cumulative culture remain unclear. In a comparative study of sequential problem solving, we provided groups of capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, and children with an experimental puzzlebox that could be solved in three stages to retrieve rewards of increasing desirability. The success of the children, but not of the chimpanzees or capuchins, in reaching higher-level solutions was strongly associated with a package of sociocognitive processes—including teaching through verbal instruction, imitation, and prosociality—that were observed only in the children and covaried with performance. (1114)

Dennel, Robin and Wil Roebroeks. An Asian Perspective on Early Human Dispersal from Africa. Nature. 438/1099, 2005. Due to new fossil findings in Asia – the Nihewan basin, China, Dmanisi, Georgia, Flores, Indonesia, and other sites - the popular ‘Out of Africa’ image is brought into question. A much more involved occasion of hominin migrations is described in technical detail which bodes for wider origins including Asia.

Duda, Pavel and Jan Zrzavy. Human Population History Revealed by a Supertree Approach. Nature Scientific Reports. 6/29890, 2016. University of South Bohemia and Charles University, Czech Republic, zoologists avail the latest anthropological and genetic data, along with superclade topologies, to create an intricate reconstruction. See also The Physiology and Habitat of the Last Universal Common Ancestor by Madeline Weiss, et al in Nature Microbiology (1/16116, 2016).

Over the past two decades numerous new trees of modern human populations have been published extensively but little attention has been paid to formal phylogenetic synthesis. We utilized the “matrix representation with parsimony” (MRP) method to infer a composite phylogeny (supertree) of modern human populations, based on 257 genetic/genomic, as well as linguistic, phylogenetic trees and 44 admixture plots from 200 published studies (1990–2014). The resulting supertree topology includes the most basal position of S African Khoisan followed by C African Pygmies, and the paraphyletic section of all other sub-Saharan peoples. (Abstract excerpts)

Dunbar, Robin. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. The Oxford University anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist (search) heads its Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group. He is an active author with colleagues of scholarly and popular works about the past course and cognitive reasons by which we sapiens can accomplish such a retrospective. A trajectory is here traced from earlier primate sociality through five transitions: Australopithecines, Early Homo, Archaic Humans, Modern Humans, and Neolithic and Beyond. The tacit guide and measure is his Social Brain theory whence brain size grew in tandem with communal group intensity. See also Thinking Big (2014) which he wrote with Clive Gamble and John Gowlett for another description.

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10  Next  [More Pages]