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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 Earthtwinian Genesis Synthesis

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

Migliano, Andrea, et al. Characterization of Hunter-Gather Networks and Implications for Cumulative Culture. Nature Human Behavior. 1/0043, 2017. Fourteen University College London, and University of Zaragoza, Spain anthropologists including Mark Dyble and Vito Latora enter more exemplary findings of relational associations as they foster a viable communal coherence. By such a universal presence and forma, an independent geo-mathematical source once again appears in effect.

Social networks in modern societies are highly structured, usually involving frequent contact with a small number of unrelated ‘friends.’ However, contact network structures in traditional small-scale societies, especially hunter-gatherers, are poorly characterized. We developed a portable wireless sensing technology (motes) to study within-camp proximity networks among Agta and BaYaka hunter-gatherers in fine detail. We show that hunter-gatherer social networks exhibit signs of increased efficiency for potential information exchange. We also show that strong friendships are more important than family ties in predicting levels of shared knowledge among individuals. We hypothesize that efficient transmission of cumulative culture may have shaped human social networks and contributed to our tendency to extend networks beyond kin and form strong non-kin ties. (Abstract excerpts)

Mitani, John, et al, eds. The Evolution of Primate Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. A quarter century after its Primate Societies predecessor, this volume is said to be a comprehensive update and survey of these neighbor kindred species to ourselves. A premier cadre of behavioral primatologists contribute their expertise such as “The Apes: Taxonomy, Biogeography, Life Histories, and Behavioral Ecology” by David Watts, “Genetic Consequences of Primate Social Organization,” Anthony Di Fiore, “Human Survival and Life History in Evolutionary Perspective,” Michael Gurven, and “The Adaptive Value of Sociality” by Joan Silk.

Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996. The British anthropologist finds a comparable sequence for the appearance of learning capacities for both species and individuals. A reviewer, Irwin Silverman, writes in Contemporary Psychology. 43/10, 1998: “The premise of Mithen’s theory is that the development of mind, in terms of both phylogeny and ontogeny, progresses through three stages. The first is composed solely of a ‘general intelligence,’ broadly based but suitable only for simple tasks. In the second, general intelligence is supplemented, though not replaced, by independently operating ‘specialized intelligences,’ specifically for social, natural history, technical and linguistic functions. In the third, these specialized intelligences come to perform in harmony with each other.” (685)

Mounier, Aurelien and Marta Mirazon Lahr. Deciphering African Late Middle Pleistocene Hominin Diversity and the Origin of Our Species. Nature Communications. 10/3406, 2019. Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge anthropologists avail graphic computational morphings to better serve our Anthropocene reconstructions of the sapient beings whom altogether got us to this point. The work merited a New York Times review by Carl Zimmer. Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer (Sept. 10, 2019).

The origin of Homo sapiens remains a matter of debate. Here we use a phylogenetic modelling method to predict possible morphologies of a last common ancestor of all modern humans, which we compare to LMP African fossils. Our results support a complex process for the evolution of H. sapiens, with the recognition of different, geographically localised, populations and lineages in Africa. Based on the available fossils, H. sapiens appears to have originated from the coalescence of South and, possibly, East-African source populations, while North-African fossils may represent a population which introgressed into Neandertals during the LMP. (Abstract excerpt)

Mylopotamitaki, Dorothea, et al. Homo sapiens reached the higher latitudes of Europe by 45,000 years ago.. Nature. 626/341, 2024. We cite this article by some thirty paleontologists mainly based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as a current example of the latest abilities, as the quote says, to recover and learn about the prehistoric human-like beings who came before us. But in regard, one is led to wonder whom is the planetary worldwise personsphere that is now conducting these retrospectlves. What manner of reality forms and seems requires its own late self-recognition and maybe select affirmation?

The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Europe is associated with the regional disappearance of Neanderthals and the spread of Homo sapiens. Late Neanderthals persisted in western Europe for millennia in eastern Europe. Archaeological evidence also indicates the presence of several technocomplexes, complicating the behavioural adaptations with specific hominin groups. Here we present the morphological and proteomic taxonomic identification, mitochondrial DNA analysis and direct radiocarbon dating of human remains at the site Ilsenhöhle in Ranis (Germany), earliest Upper Palaeolithic H. sapiens in Eurasia. Our results strengthen the notion of a patchwork of distinct human populations and technocomplexes in Europe during this transitional period. (Abstract)

O’Brien, Michael and R. Lee Lyman. Applying Evolutionary Archaeology. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2000. In so doing, the authors use systematic and cladistic techniques to diagram and structure the branching emergence of cultural artifacts. In a somewhat dense work, an initial contrast is set up between an earlier essentialism of independent natural kinds and a post-Darwin materialism, which they ascribe to, of particular, contingents units.

O’Brien, Michael and R. Lee Lyman, eds. Style, Function, Transmission: Evolutionary Archaeological Perspectives. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. A reinterpretation of these cultural features in terms of Darwinian descent with modification. This synthesis of biological and cultural evolution draws on the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, among others, to identify corresponding gene-like replicators and interactors. Human artifacts take the place of fossils by which can be studied their transmission (style) and selection (function).

Overmann, Karenleigh and Frederick Coolidge, eds. Squeezing Minds from Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. This volume is a 40 year review of the title academic field which broadly studies, in addition to fossils, a recovery of hominin cerebral and communal experience. It was conceived by Thomas Wynn, now at the University of Colorado and a coauthor, from his idea that stone tools, carvings, along with markings, could serve this task, as it surely has. Among chapters, we note Homo Artifex by Dietrich Stout, Sticks, Stones, and the Origins of Sapience by Philip Bernard and The Origin of Cumulative Culture by Miriam Haidle. Working themes which run through are Robin Dunbar’s social brain, and niche construction via an extended evolutionary model. See especially In Three Minds by Cory Stade and Clive Gamble, reviewed herein.

Cognitive archaeology is a relatively new interdisciplinary science that uses cognitive and psychological models to explain archeological artifacts like stone tools, figurines, and art. Squeezing Minds From Stones is a collection of essays from early pioneers in the field, like archaeologists Thomas Wynn and Iain Davidson, and evolutionary primatologist William McGrew, to 'up and coming' newcomers like Shelby Putt, Ceri Shipton, Mark Moore, James Cole, Natalie Uomini, and Lana Ruck. Their essays address a wide variety of cognitive archaeology topics, including the value of experimental archaeology, primate archaeology, the intent of ancient tool makers, and how they may have lived and thought.

Paabo, Svante. The Human Condition: A Molecular Approach. Cell. 157/216, 2014. As our Paleogenomics section cites, the MPI Evolutionary Anthropology geneticist and original sequencer of Neanderthal genomes describes how past lineages of homo sapiens are being wholly revised and sketched anew by such advanced genetic sequemce techniques.

Research into when and where modern humans originated and how they differ from, and interacted with, other now-extinct forms of human has so far been the realm of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. However, over the past decade, molecular geneticists have begun to study genomes of extinct humans. Here, I discuss where we stand today with respect to understanding how modern humans came to differ from Neandertals and other human forms that existed until about 30,000 years ago.

Paige, Jonathan, et al.. 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene. PNAS. 121/26, 2024. University of Missouri and Arizona State University anthropologists carried out extensive timeline studies of how and when early humans came to improve tool making and usage. Their findings led them to propose that a collective degree of competence which could be passed on seemed occur some six hundred thousand years ago. See also a news report When did humans start social knowledge accumulation? at Ars technical (June 21, 2024).

Homo sapiens has come to occupy diverse ecological habitats from tropical forests to arctic tundra. Our studies have led us to attribute this epochal expansion an accumulation of modifications, innovations, and improvements through social learning. Long ago hominins came to use technologies and know-how beyond what a single naive individual could achieve. We analyzed the stone tools which led them made during the last 3.3 My and found that they simple until about 600,000 years B.P. after which such implements rapidly increased in complexity. Consistent with findings from other research teams, we suggest that this transition signals the development of cumulative culture in the human lineage. (Significance)

Parker, Sue Taylor, et al, eds. Biology, Brains and Behavior. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2000. Papers on the ontogeny and phylogeny of brain morphology, behavioral complexity, language, primate play, and so on, within a general recapitualtionist frame.

Parmigiani, Stefano, et al. What Made Us Human? Biological and Cultural Evolution of Homo sapiens. Journal of Anthropological Sciences. Vol. 94, 2016. With Telmo Pievani and Ian Tattersall, an introduction to this special issue to keep up with the rush of fossil, genetic, ecological and other findings about the circuitous course from which me and We social, loquacious persons evolved and emerged. Among the 18 authoritative entries are Evolution of Brain and Culture: The Neurological and Cognitive Journey from Australopithecus to Albert Einstein by Dean Falk, The Evolution of Language and Thought by Philip Lieberman, and Visuospatial Integration and Human Evolution by Emiliano Bruner, et al.

The science of human evolution has recently been changing rapidly, and we know that Homo sapiens is the last surviving branch of a once-luxuriant tree of hominid species. Until very recent times, our lineage shared the planet with several other human species, such as those containing Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. Following its biological and anatomical birth in Africa around 200,000 years ago Homo sapiens spread around the world, following multiple paths of expansion that we can now track using the techniques of molecular biology, ancient DNA studies and paleoanthropology. In this global, ecological and demographic scenario, at one point our species began to express cognitively modern behaviors: a “symbolic intelligence” so peculiar that scientists view it as the hallmark of human creativity and uniqueness itself.

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