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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

Kohler, Timothy and Sander van der Leeuw, eds. The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007. A leading cadre of anthropologists press on with a reconstruction of how we became human in terms of complex adaptive systems theory. In such regard, “large numbers of interacting agents self-organize the emergence of collective behavior.” A formidable tome, once more these ubiquitous dynamics are found in effect for every historic and geographic culture. See also in regard “Modelling Across Millennia: Interdisciplinary Paths to Ancient Socio-Ecological Systems” by Stefani Crabtree and Tim Kohler in Ecological Modelling, online March 2012.

Kohn, Marek. Made in Savannahstan. New Scientist. July 1, 2006. The British science writer surveys the latest theories of hominid migrations out of Africa, which seem to suggest a much earlier departure.

Kohring, Sheila and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, eds. Socializing Complexity: Structure, Interaction, and Power in Archaeological Discourse. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2007. Whereby complex adaptive systems science is bringing new perspectives and methods to better study and understand societies of the Copper Age and pre-Hispanic Andes, and presently from Inner Asia to South-Central California. A salient paper would be Notes on a New Paradigm by Carole Crumley.

Laland, Kevin. The Cultural Animal. Scientific American. September, 2018. In an issue on The Science of Being Human, the University of St. Andrews behavioral and evolutionary biologist (search) and 2016 author of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind attributes our Homo sapiens ascent to a tandem reinforcement between linguistic versatility and group traditions. See also, for example, Human Cumulative Culture: A Comparative Perspective by Lewis Dean, et al (KL) in Biological Reviews (89/2, 2014).

The emerging consensus is that humanity’s accomplishments derive from an ability to acquire knowledge and skills from other people. Individuals then build iteratively on that reservoir of pooled knowledge over long periods. This communal Store of experience enables creation of ever more efficient and diverse solutions to life’s challenges. It was not our large brains, intelligence or language that gave us culture but rather our culture that gave us large brains, intelligence and language. For our species and perhaps a small number of other species, culture transformed the evolutionary process. (34)

Lamberg-Karlovsky, Martha, ed. The Breakout: The Origins of Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Monographs, 2000. Research reports on intertwined causes in the third millennium B.C. for the birth of complex societies such as absolutist ruler/ruled, incipient democracy, or market pressures. David Marbury-Lewis finds the pervasive binary cosmologies that distinguished archaic societies are lost and forgotten on the way to an increasing material secularization.

Langer, Jonas. The Descent of Cognitive Development. Developmental Science. 3/4, 2000. A constructivist theory of heterochonic (extenuated maturation time) evolution from asynchronic, segmented events in monkeys to synchronic physical and logico-mathematical processes in humans. A general recapitulation of development and evolution is then outlined by these terminal elaboration and addition factors. (See also the peer responses to this article.)

Lansing, J. Stephen. Complex Adaptive Systems. Annual Review of Anthropology. 32/183, 2003. A technical introduction for anthropologists to CAS as a better way to understand their dynamic subject. The finding that global patterns self-organize and emerge from many local interactions is seen of much application to complex societies. The author is recognized as a pioneer in this regard for his work on Balinese agricultural ecosystems.

Lovejoy, C. Owen. Ardipithecus and Earliest Human Evolution in Light of 21st Century Developmental Biology. Journal of Anthropological Research. 70/3, 2014. In this University of New Mexico journal, the veteran Kent State University biological anthropologist describes how a cross-fertilization between anatomical phylogeny and morphogenetic ontogeny can foster new advances in their integral reconstruction.

One specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, ARA-VP-6/500, is the earliest and among the most complete fossil hominids ever recovered. The thoroughness of its recovery and preparation has yielded surprising revelations about its environment as well as new knowledge about the divergence of our earliest human ancestors from the last common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees. Decades of groundbreaking discoveries in developmental biology have also transformed our understanding of the evolutionary process itself, especially the need to view the significance of adult anatomical structures holistically. Today, no such structure can be reasonably understood without direct reference to its likely mode of morphogenesis. The twenty-first-century convergence of these two special sources of information requires a radical revision of how our early hominid forebears set the stage for our own subsequent evolution. Although we usually attribute our complex social structure to our massive brain, current evidence suggests that the reverse might have been true almost as far back as the original emergence of our clade. (Abstract)

Maschner, Herbert, ed. Darwinian Archaeologies. New York: Plenum, 1996. A recast and expansion of search, dig and collect stages into a unifying evolutionary context to not only study artifacts and dwellings but kinship, language, cognition, and social constructs.

Maslin, Mark. The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. A University College London professor of climatology and environmental sciences covers a wide trajectory and territory across chapters from Early Human Evolution, Tectonics and Celestial Mechanics to The Social Brain and Humanity’s Future so to say that African climate pulses were a main driver for an expansive hominid cerebral capacity by which to cope and survive. Maslin is also a leading advocate and spokesperson for our own adaptive response of a global green ecoculture. View his website and the new journal Geo: Geography and Environment. And from late retrospective, it again seems imperative that we recognize, beyond an Anthropocene age, an emergent personsphere sapience learning by her/his own palliative self.

McGlade, James and Sander van der Leeuw, eds. Time, Process and Structural Transformation in Archeology. London: Routledge, 1997. Innovative papers toward a “New Archeology” based on an implementation of the sciences of complexity. A quote from the editor’s introduction:

We are thus led to the fact that we must consider the emergent properties latent in all human social organization as a fundamental self-organizing principle. (10) .…our aim is simply to demonstrate the great potential of non-linear dynamics as a way of reconceptualizing long-term history. (27)

Mellars, Paul. Why Did Modern Human Populations Disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 Years Ago? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103/9381, 2006. The Cambridge University archeologist argues that a combination of environmental and behavioral changes impelled homo sapiens, after some 100,000 years of relative stasis, to migrate north and eastward, via a new model based on comparative mitochondrial DNA studies.

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