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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

Dunbar, Robin. The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology. 32/163, 2003. Dunbar continues to verify that the distinguishing quality of human life is its intensive social character. This feature began in simian groups whose survival demanded a sign or language-based network. A linear relation can then be drawn between mean group size and relative brain neocortex volume from monkeys to apes to hominids to humans. An average nuclear human group size over many thousands of years comes out to around 150.

In summary, parsimony and biological common sense would suggest that it is group size that drives brain size evolution rather than brain size driving group size and that group size itself is a response to an ecological problem. (169)

Dunbar, Robin. Why are Apes so Smart? Kappeler, Peter and Michael Pereira, eds. Primate Life Histories and Socioecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dunbar updates his social brain hypothesis which contends that the main reason primates evolved relatively large brains was the influence of group communication and linguistic interaction. The “grade shift” to novel hominid and human capacities is then attributed not to genes alone but the resultant culture and its cognitive demands.

Dunbar, Robin, et al, eds. The Evolution of Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Perceptive essays to breech the impasse between social anthropology and evolutionary theory so as to reach a more comprehensive picture of how human societies formed.

Emery, Nathan, et al. Introduction: Social Intelligence: From Brain to Culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 362/485, 2007. A revisiting of the hypothesis by Nicholas Humphrey and others in the 1970’s that the most powerful driver of primate encephalization or bigger brains was not the demands of coping with environments but a need to recognize, remember, interact with, track, deceive, and so on, their troop members. The volume is distinguished by the main contributors from psychologists and primatetologists to philosophers since such as Robin Dunbar, Chris Frith, Andrew Witten, Nicola Clayton, Kim Sterelny, and Daniel Povinelli. Humphrey himself concludes with A Society of Selves saying that our human achievement of personal consciousness at once makes us at once intensely social and lonely.

Falk, Dean. Braindance: New Discoveries about Human Origins and Brain Evolution. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2004. In this revised and expanded edition of her 1994 book, the Florida State University anthropologist perceives the emergence of modern human brains as a “choreography” between earlier holistic right hemisphere qualities and later developing left hemisphere linguistic abilities. The last chapter is called Brainwar where Falk wonders are we having the Last Dance because we seem unable to reign in and move beyond male primate violence.

The same evolved brain that is responsible for human activities such as writing poetry or composing symphonies continues to be fascinated with global military endeavors that could put an abrupt end to the braindance. …. our species needs to exercise vigilantly those controls over our natural primate tendency to engage in potentially catastrophic dominance interactions. (8-9)

Fernandez-Lopez, Javier, et al. Understanding Hunter-Gatherer Cultural Evolution Needs Network Thinking. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. August, 2022. Nine system archaeologists from Spain, France, the USA, Canada, Switzerland, and Denmark such as Maxime Derex and Marcus Hamilton post another good notice of the current historic turn from object pieces and entities alone so to factor in the equally real and more vital presence of actual group interactivities. See herein T. Frottier and C. Kocoglu for other instances. Thus into these 2020s might we peoples be able to learn about our true familial affinities in time to stop isolate men fighting and allow women and love to save us

Hunter–gatherers past and present live in complex societies, and the structure of these can be assessed using social networks. We outline how the integration of new evidence from cultural evolution experiments, computer simulations, ethnography, and archaeology open new research horizons to understand the role of social networks in cultural evolution.

Finlayson, Clive. The Smart Neanderthal: Cave Art, Bird Catching, and the Cognitive Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. The British behavioral ecologist has been a director of archaeology excavations in Gibraltar. After many years of field studies, he seeks to correct the olden view of a brutish, dim-witted hominid. By virtue of these title abilities and much more, this Anthropo ancestral stage actually participated in and contributed to evolutionary stirrings of intellectual faculties and social cultures. OK

Fuchs, Benedikt, et al. Fractal Multi-Level Organization of Human Groups in a Virtual World. arXiv:1403.3228. Posted March 2014, leading European systems scholars Fuchs, and Stefan Thurner, Medical University of Vienna, along with Didier Sornette, ETH Zurich, contribute to recent worldwide findings of archetypal network topologies and processes everywhere. The same dynamic self-similar scales take form as neural connectomes, social spiders, bacterial colonies, migrations, financial economies, from galaxies to genomes. If we might perceive this phenomena altogether, a robust evidence appears in our midst for the implied presence of an independent, universally applicable program-like source.

Humans are fundamentally social. They have progressively dominated their environment by the strength and creativity provided by and within their grouping. It is well recognised that human groups are highly structured, and the anthropological literature has loosely classified them according to their size and function, such as support cliques, sympathy groups, bands, cognitive groups, tribes, linguistic groups and so on. Recently, combining data on human grouping patterns in a comprehensive and systematic study, Zhou et al. identified a quantitative discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to 3, which was later confirmed for hunter-gatherer groups and for other mammalian societies. Using high precision large scale Internet-based social network data, we extend these early findings on a very large data set. We analyse the organisational structure of a complete, multi-relational, large social multiplex network of a human society consisting of about 400,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game for which we know all about the group memberships of every player. Remarkably, the online players exhibit the same type of structured hierarchical layers as the societies studied by anthropologists, where each of these layers is three to four times the size of the lower layer. Our findings suggest that the hierarchical organisation of human society is deeply nested in human psychology. (Abstract)

Fuentes, Agustin. It’s Not All Sex and Violence: Integrated Anthropology and the Role of Cooperation and Social Complexity in Human Evolution. American Anthropologist. 106/4, 2004. While this field has historically emphasized competition, aggression and warfare over cooperation, new integral research finds cooperative behaviors to be equally prevalent. They are involved in niche modification, among other activities, which may be influenced by complex adaptive systems prior to natural selection.

Gamble, Clive. Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. The University of Southampton archaeologist, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and prolific author upon the reconstruction of how our Homo sapiens genus and genius arose from primate precursors. His 1993 Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization began the project. By the 2010s the depth of our retrospective ancestry, by field work and academic theory, now reaches 10 million years ago (Mya). With colleagues Robin Dunbar, John Gowlett, and others, two themes distinguish – encephalization as relative brain growth, and larger social settlements. Four “archives” attest – artifacts, symbols, anatomy and genes, and lately digital resources via the worldwide web.

The work is arranged into six historic “Terrae” of 10 – 3.3 Mya, 3.3 - 1.8, 1.8 Mya – 50Kya, 50 – 4, 4 – 1, and 1400 AD until now as peoples migrated from Africa across land bridges, oceans, continents, rivers. In parallel with agrarian villages, commercial cities, and urban sprawl, bigger brains and knowing minds led to increasingly collaborative extended, modes of cognition. See also Clive Gamble, et al, eds. Big Histories, Human Lives (SAR Press, 2013), and Michael Tomasello’s 2014 A Natural History of Human Thinking for similar perceptions. And by this tandem of intelligence and community, presently transitioning on a global scale, might one imagine a novel Anthropo Sapiens, as the way a certain genesis uniVerse tries to discover itself?

In this worldwide survey, Clive Gamble explores the evolution of the human imagination, without which we would not have become a global species. He sets out to determine the cognitive and social basis for our imaginative capacity and traces the evidence back into deep human history. He argues that it was the imaginative ability to "go beyond" and to create societies where people lived apart yet stayed in touch that made us such effective world settlers. To make his case Gamble brings together information from a wide range of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics, geography, quaternary science and anthropology. He presents a novel deep history that combines the archaeological evidence for fossil hominins with the selective forces of Pleistocene climate change, engages with the archaeogeneticists' models for population dispersal and displacement, and ends with the Europeans' rediscovery of the deep history settlement of the earth. (Publisher)

I lead research projects and publish widely on the archaeology of human origins. I undertake pioneering research into the social life of our earliest ancestors and in particular investigate the timing of global colonisation. My research has led me into many parts of the world, some of them remote, to answer the questions; when and why did we become the only human species to achieve a global distribution? The key to understanding why this remarkable process took place so late in human evolution involves teams of Palaeolithic archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, quaternary scientists and anthropologists. The central issue is the evolutionary relationship between an expanding hominin brain, selected by the benefits of larger group sizes, and its extension across time and space by material means. (CG website)

Gamble, Clive, et al. Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. With John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar (search each author), senior British anthropologists report upon the 2003-2010 Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain project which reconstructed the past seven million years from anthropoid apes to ourselves. Its working thesis was that brain size and mental capacity arose due to and in parallel with increasing degrees of communal interaction. These findings revealed a nested scale of social bonding from intimate groups (nom. 5), close friends or foragers (15), friends and tribal bands (50), and onto what is known as “Dunbar’s number” of some 150 acquaintances. See also Dunbar’s companion 2016 volume Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior.

Gangestad, Steven and Jeffry Simpson, eds. The Evolution of Mind. New York: Guilford Press, 2007. Some 43 papers contribute to a collaborative proposal to study and appreciate human cognition and activities as springing from and much explained by a Darwinian evolution. A typical locus is the Human Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences group at the University of New Mexico. Its copious range would include a gamut of primates, development, modularity, group selection, mating, a social brain, psychology, cultural mores, and so on. This is fine but begs reflection about what kind of reality evolves cerebral creatures who then can altogether “reconstruct” how they came to be. And the endeavor remains compromised, as authors as Edward Hagen and Donald Symons note, by inadequate, vested machine and computer models.

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