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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

Gardenfors, Peter. How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. A professor of cognitive science at Lund University, Sweden, takes us on an engaging tour of what makes human beings special and smart. The author has found a clever rhesus monkey who is able to talk and provides an opinionated commentary. Four empirical realms – phylogeny, neurophysiology, ontogeny, and archeological - are drawn upon in support. From simian origins comes an ever-expanding realm of externally stored memory and knowledge, a view akin to that of Merlin Donald. Once again, individual development is seen to retrace its phylogenetic heritage. And by this perspective “The Open Person” finally achieves an independence from evolutionary constraints.

My main thesis in this book is that the development of an ever-richer inner world has provided us with an increasing number of cognitive faculties. In turn, this has led to the evolution of language, to an increasingly more advanced transmission of knowledge between generations, and to culture. (2)

Godsen, Chris and Lambros Malafouris. Process Archaeology. World Archaeology. 47/5, 2015. Oxford University archaeologists advocate moving beyond artifact relics to admit the equally real, important presence of creative groupwide activities as they aided survival and relative cultural advance. See also Homo faber Revisited: Material Engagement Theory by Don Ihde and Malafouris in Philosophy and Technology (32/195, 2019).

We advocate a Process Archaeology which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in between the hand of the potter and the affordances of clay. This specific creative entanglement of flow and form on a fast bodily timescale provides our grounding metaphor for an archaeology of becoming over the long term. Subsequent propositions provide the basis for exploring issues of longer-term material engagement and change. (Abstract)

Gowlett, John, et al. Human Evolution and the Archaeology of the Social Brain. Current Anthropology. 53/6, 2012. Archaeologists Gowlett, University of Liverpool, and Clive Gamble, University of Southampton, along with evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, University of Oxford review to date their retrospective emphasis upon an interplay of evolving minds and group living. The paper opens with a lament that these aspects are not given their due because prior work has, of necessity, dealt with artifacts and missed what is going on in cognition and behavior. It is proposed to redress by an adoption of the “social brain hypothesis,” much from Dunbar (search), whence the main, unique impetus from primate to human is a large expansion in cerebral size caused by the need to keep up with increasing hominin clans and tribes (the original facebook).

A notable contribution, but I wonder, per the first quote, why it was felt necessary to insert the word “nonteleological.” Is the prevailing scientific mindset so strong that no mention of or allusion to anything going on by itself is allowed? (As I have been told a number of times.) But the second quote might then be taken to infer that an oriented evolutionary “encephalization” is actually in process, leading to our phenomenal human individual and societal acumens. These diametric and unexamined contradictions continue to inhibit and undercut much of science and philosophy today.

There is, however, an alternative approach. Rather than either looking for primate analogues to reconstruct early social behavior or presumptively confirming the importance of agriculture, a more promising approach may be to….focus on elucidating the structural relationships involved. If we can understand the broad primate-wide rules that govern the behavior, ecology, and demography of primates (including humans), then we may be better able to identify the sequence of changes that have taken place since the last common ancestor that led, step by (nonteleological) step, to ourselves. (695)

Our proposal is that by focusing attention on the developing nature of sociality and the evolving (social) mind that underpinned it, an opportunity is created for a fresh investigation of our earliest past. We have shown how cognitive concepts that paleoanthropologists normally regard as off-limits to their date (for example, intentionality) can now enter the debate. (710) We conclude ….that we should look instead to the much longer-term implications of encephalization to discover something significant about ourselves. (710)

Gumerman, George and Murray Gell-Mann, eds. Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. A Santa Fe Institute conference proceedings on the rise and fall of early indigenous societies as they may be better understood in terms of complex adaptive system theory.

Haidle, Miriam, et al, eds. The Nature of Culture. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. The proceedings of a symposium on The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans held in 2011 at the University of Tubingen. Some chapters are Culture as a Form of Nature by Volker Gerhardt, The Evolution of Hominin Culture by Andrew Whiten, and Childhood, Play and the Evolution of Cultural Capacity in Neanderthals and Modern Humans by April Nowell.

This volume introduces a model of the expansion of cultural capacity as a systemic approach with biological, historical and individual dimensions. It is contrasted with existing approaches from primatology and behavioural ecology; influential factors like differences in life history and demography are discussed; and the different stages of the development of cultural capacity in human evolution are traced in the archaeological record. The volume provides a synthetic view on a) the different factors and mechanisms of cultural development, and b) expansions of cultural capacities in human evolution beyond the capacities observed in animal culture so far. It is an important topic because only a volume of contributions from different disciplines can yield the necessary breadth to discuss the complex subject.

Hamilton, Marcus, et al. Nonlinear Scaling of Space Use in Human Hunter-Gatherers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/4765, 2007. Reviewed more in Complex Human Societies, a break-through envisioning of our close groupings as social organisms.

Hatdield, Gary and Holly Pitman, eds. Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropo, 2013. A collection of 14 papers from a Penn Museum Research Conference that forms an working summary of how we sapiens became able to reconstruct this cognitive heritage. We note Mimesis Theory Re-Examined Twenty Years after the Fact by Merlin Donald, The Role of Cooperation in the Evolution of Protolanguage by Peter Gardenfors, The Cathedral Model for the Evolution of Human Cognition by Steven Mithen, Human Behavioral Ecology, Optimality, and Human Action by Kim Sterelny, and The Primate Mind before Tools, Language, and Culture by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney. As Donald’s work well conveys (search), four episodic, mimetic, mythic and theoretic stages arise as if to prepare for our capacity for individual and social recognition.

Haun, David, et al. Evolutionary Psychology of Spatial Representations in the Hominidae. Current Biology. 16/17, 2007. It is now established that our individual brains develop from an initial right hemisphere holistic emphasis (face recognition) over the first three years to then shift to the detail-oriented left side maturation. Primate evolution, per this paper, began in similar fashion with a necessary focus on spatial locale and pattern. What may be suggested, if to so peruse, is a broad recapitulation between personal ontogeny and hominid phylogeny.

We show, first, that all non-human great apes and 1-year-old human infants exhibit a preference for place over feature strategies for spatial memory. This suggests the common ancestor of all great apes had the same preference. We then examine 3-year-old human children and find that this preferences reverses. These findings, based on both phylogenetic and ontogenetic contrasts, open up the prospect of a systematic evolutionary psychology resting upon the cladistics of cognitive preferences. (1736)

Henn, Brenna, et al. The Great Human Expansion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109/17758, 2012. Brenna Henn, with coauthors Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, are Stanford University geneticists. This paper is significant because Cavalli-Sforza, now 90, pioneered since the 1970s the reconstruction of historical migratory pathways by way of their relative genetic endowments, which are further seen to track a people’s malleable language. His 1995 book was The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. He was joined by Feldman and colleagues at Stanford to pursue this approach, lately aided by genome sequencing and Internet capabilities. As a result, this comprehensive 2012 scenario of humankind’s arduous diaspora trek “out of Africa” can be well articulated.

Genetic and paleoanthropological evidence is in accord that today’s human population is the result of a great demic (demographic and geographic) expansion that began approximately 45,000 to 60,000 y ago in Africa and rapidly resulted in human occupation of almost all of the Earth’s habitable regions. Genomic data from contemporary humans suggest that this expansion was accompanied by a continuous loss of genetic diversity, a result of what is called the “serial founder effect.” In addition to genomic data, the serial founder effect model is now supported by the genetics of human parasites, morphology, and linguistics. This particular population history gave rise to the two defining features of genetic variation in humans: genomes from the substructured populations of Africa retain an exceptional number of unique variants, and there is a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity within populations living outside of Africa. These two patterns are relevant for medical genetic studies mapping genotypes to phenotypes and for inferring the power of natural selection in human history. It should be appreciated that the initial expansion and subsequent serial founder effect were determined by demographic and sociocultural factors associated with hunter-gatherer populations. (Abstract)

The evolution of languages is rapid – in a few hundred years, a language may change enough to destroy mutual understanding between neighboring populations, or even between ancestors and their descendants 1,000 yr later. Families of languages that are similar enough that most linguists recognize them as such have a common origin in the range of 10,000 yr ago. There is a remarkable similarity between the linguistic tree and the genetic tree, confirm Darwin’s speculation that, if we knew the biological tree of humans, we could predict that of their languages. As might be expected the geographical distribution of language families and that of genetic groupings of indigenous populations are also reasonable closely related. (17761)

Henshilwood, Christopher and Francesco d’Errico, eds. Homo Symbolicus: The Dawn of Language, Imagination and Spirituality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Due by year’s end, the Proceedings from a 2009 Templeton Foundation conference held in Cape Town, with a visit to the Blombos Cave excavation. Invited scholars were Justin Barrett, Alison Brooks, Benoît Dubreuil, Francesco d’Errico, William McGrew, Paul Mellars, Paul Pettitt, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, F. LeRon Shults, Lynette Wadley, and David Sloan Wilson. A Google search of title and editor words will retrieve both the original Templeton site, and the publisher’s posting with table of contents and chapter abstracts. Of especial interest is D. S. Wilson’s “The Human Major Transition in Relation to Symbolic Behaviour, including Language, Imagination, and Spirituality.” We cite the book’s synopsis, and Wilson’s chapter Abstract.

The emergence of symbolic culture, classically identified with the European cave paintings of the Ice Age, is now seen, in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries, as a complex nonlinear process taking root in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. In this book the archaeologists responsible for some of these new discoveries, flanked by ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission, evolutionary psychologists modelling the emergence of metarepresentations, as well as biologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists and an astronomer combine their research findings. Their results call into question our very conception of human nature and animal behaviour, and they create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage's cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them. (Publisher)

Human evolution can be described in terms of three C’s: Cognition, Culture, and Cooperation. Cognition includes the capacity for symbolic thought that lies at the heart of both language and spirituality. Culture includes the capacity to transmit information, both horizontally and vertically, leading to cumulative behavioural change and rapid adaptation to local environments. Cooperation includes the capacity to engage in prosocial behaviours far beyond one’s circle of genealogical relatives and narrow reciprocators. The three C’s all have precursors in nonhuman species, but they are vastly elaborated in our species. In what sequence did the 3 C’s of human evolution arise and how are they related to each other? The first step in human evolution was a major evolutionary transition, which enabled withingroup cooperation to take place much more strongly than before. The major transition took place without a prior advance in cognitive ability and was a pre-requisite for the advanced forms of human cognition that we associate with language, symbolic thought, and spirituality. Moreover, much simpler adaptations were required as prerequisites for the advanced forms. The entire package of traits that make humans so distinctive are forms of teamwork that require interactions among trustworthy social partners. The first C to evolve was cooperation and the other two C’s are forms of cooperation. (Wilson, 133)

Heyes, Cecilia. New Thinking: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 367/2091, 2012. Evolutionary Psychology, with its “Swiss Army knife,” multi-module brain approach has since the 1990s bothered those who do not concur. As their ranks coalesced, the University of Oxford behavioral psychologist here introduces an issue, from a June 2011 workshop at Oxford, on a proposed alternative. Such “New Thinking” aims to better account for symbolic language, human discoveries of history, science, culture, and “a fabulous range of art, architecture, music and dance.” It is informed by “new theory and evidence from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology,” along with “new forms of cognition of causal reasoning, imitation, language, metacognition, and theory of mind.” An exemplary array of articles follows such as New Thinking, Innateness and Inherited Representation by Nicholas Shea, Transmission Fidelity is the Key to the Build-Up of Cumulative Culture by Hannah Lewis and Kevin Laland, and Eva Jablonka, et al, The Co-Evolution of Language and Emotions. But on the Evolutionary Psychology website (www.epjournal.net) is a blog entry about this issue which notes both a misrepresentation of EP, and pretensions about its own worth.

Hill, Kim, et al. Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure. Science. 331/1286, 2010. An international team of ten anthropologists, four from the School of Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University, achieve a significant advance in reconstructing the evolutionary course from primate to hominids to Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ success. The endeavor merited an editorial piece in the same issue, “The Deep Social Structure of Humankind” by Bernard Chapais, (see above) as it neatly verified his theory. Its importance was also cited in two New York Times stories by Nicholas Wade: “New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes” on March 10, and “Supremacy of a Social Network,” March 14. Wade interviewed both Hill and Chapais, and provides a good summary.

To wit, while it is often assumed that humans evolved from a chimpanzee lineage, early social mores where not of a chimp kind where competitive males fought to be Alpha, with subservient females and infants at their disposal. Rather, per Levi-Strauss and Chapais, several elements intervened and mediated. As males gained a modicum of weaponry, the old rank battle became dislodged. As a result, mother and father mates came to form a “pair-bond” of benefit to both parent and offspring. Another finding is that groupings were more than large families, rather as relatives joined neighbor clans an affinity arose between them, which held hostility in check. By this view, also supported by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute, reciprocal cooperation became the rule. Such shared intentionality went on to propel human brain size, technology, and societal commerce to this day.

Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group structure. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species’ history, we analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies. We found that hunter-gatherers display a unique social structure where (i) either sex may disperse or remain in their natal group, (ii) adult brothers and sisters often co-reside, and (iii) most individuals in residential groups are genetically unrelated. These patterns produce large interaction networks of unrelated adults and suggest that inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands. However, large social networks may help to explain why humans evolved capacities for social learning that resulted in cumulative culture. (Abstract, 1286)

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