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

7. Multiple Ancestries of Homo Sapiens

Pedersen, Cort. How Love Evolved from Sex and Gave Birth to Intelligence and Human Nature. Journal of Bioeconomics. 6/1, 2004. A University of North Carolina psychiatrist contends that emotional closeness to other persons, especially mother to infant, and in procreative pair-bonding, was an important contribution toward a “mutually enhancing co-evolution” of social complexity and brain capacity.

Piantadosi, Steven and Celeste Kidd. Extraordinary Intelligence and the Care of Infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113/6874, 2016. University of Rochester cognitive scientists propose that the high level of care over an extended period, aka altricial, that immature babies require could have been a prime mover for both individual and communal evolution.

We present evidence that pressures for early childcare may have been one of the driving factors of human evolution. We show through an evolutionary model that runaway selection for high intelligence may occur when (i) altricial neonates require intelligent parents, (ii) intelligent parents must have large brains, and (iii) large brains necessitate having even more altricial offspring. We test a prediction of this account by showing across primate genera that the helplessness of infants is a particularly strong predictor of the adults’ intelligence. We discuss related implications, including this account’s ability to explain why human-level intelligence evolved specifically in mammals. This theory complements prior hypotheses that link human intelligence to social reasoning and reproductive pressures and explains how human intelligence may have become so distinctive compared with our closest evolutionary relatives. (Abstract)

Pickrell, Joseph and David Reich. Toward a New History and Geography of Human Genes Informed by Ancient DNA. Trends in Genetics. 30/9, 2014. As befitting the genomic age, Columbia University and Harvard Medical School researchers discuss how these capabilities can help humankinder better recreate the many diasporas as migratory peoples came to fill the earth. A companion article is The Impact of Whole-Genome Sequencing on the Reconstruction of Human Population History by Krishna Veeramah and Michael Hammer in Nature Reviews Genetics (15/3, 2014).

Genetic information contains a record of the history of our species, and technological advances have transformed our ability to access this record. Many studies have used genome-wide data from populations today to learn about the peopling of the globe and subsequent adaptation to local conditions. Implicit in this research is the assumption that the geographic locations of people today are informative about the geographic locations of their ancestors in the distant past. However, it is now clear that long-range migration, admixture, and population replacement subsequent to the initial out-of-Africa expansion have altered the genetic structure of most of the world's human populations. In light of this we argue that it is time to critically reevaluate current models of the peopling of the globe, as well as the importance of natural selection in determining the geographic distribution of phenotypes. By accessing the genetic make-up of populations living at archaeologically known times and places, ancient DNA makes it possible to directly track migrations and responses to natural selection. (Abstract)

Potts, Richard. Humanity’s Descent. New York: Morrow, 1996. An extended argument by a Smithsonian Institute paleontologist with much field experience in Africa that environmental factors such as climate change or a shift from arboreal to savannah living where the prime drivers of the evolution from ape to hominid to human.

Premack, David and Ann. Original Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 2003. Veteran researchers of chimpanzee mental faculties explain how causal reasoning, analogy, imitation and language originated during primate to human evolution. The brain uses a modular basis to understand physical, biological and psychological phenomena, with similarities between infant and species learning sequences.

Raghanti, Mary Ann, et al. A Neurochemical Hypothesis for the Origin of Hominids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Online January, 2018. Nine anthropologists and neuroscientists from Kent State University, Colorado College, Icahn School of Medicine, and George Washington University including pioneers Ralph Holloway and Owen Lovejoy provide an intricate reconsideration of how simian to homo sapiens evolution can be traced by and attributed to multiple “striatal neurochemical profiles.” The paper is a 21st century example of how our late Anthropo sapient emergence can finally achieve a comprehensive retro-explanation of how we came to this place.

Two factors vital to the human clade are our unique demographic success and our social facilities including language, empathy, and altruism. These have always been difficult to reconcile with individual reproductive success. However, the striatum, a region of the basal ganglia, modulates social behavior and exhibits a unique neurochemical profile in humans. The human signature amplifies sensitivity to social cues that encourage social conformity and affiliative behavior and could have favored provisioning and monogamy in emergent hominids, consilient with the simultaneous origin of upright walking and elimination of the sectorial canine. Such exceptional neurochemistry would have favored individuals especially sensitive to social cues throughout later human evolution and may account for cerebral cortical expansion and the emergence of language. (Significance)

Rasmussen, Morten, et al. Ancient Human Genome Sequence of an Extinct Paleo-Eskimo. Nature. 463/757, 2010. Some fifty-two authors from Denmark to China to Australia employ technological advances to read the DNA of a 4,000 year old, permafrost-preserved, Greenland inhabitant. Might it then be asked what kind of fertile cosmos so evolves as to achieve its own retrospective, reconstructed description, now via this globally cognizant homo sapiens?

Read, Dwight. Change in the Form of Evolution: Transition from Primate to Hominid Forms of Social Organization. Journal of Mathematical Sociology. 29/2, 2008. The UCLA anthropologist contends that human group living arose by a mutual balance of individual and group interests. We quote the extended abstract.

In this paper I sketch a model for the transition from biologically to culturally based forms of social organization. The impetus for the transition arises from increased individualization among the non-human primates that can be observed as one moves phylogenetically from the Cercopithecoids and Ceboids (Old and New World monkeys) to the hominoids, especially the African apes. Increased individualization introduced a conflict with coherent and stable social integration that was only resolved among the hominid ancestors to modern Homo sapiens by shifting to a cultural/conceptual, rather than a behavioral/biological, basis for social organization. The shift entailed a change from evolution driven by individual fitness to evolution driven by the structural coherency of a conceptual system for social organization; that is, to selection based on group, rather than individual, level traits. Conceptually the transition depended upon the evolution of mental capacities such as a theory of mind and recursion, both of which are absent or occur only in minimal form among the non-human primates. (91)

Read, Dwight. How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012. At his wife Fadwa’s suggestion, the UCLA mathematical anthropologist provides a summary statement of his many articles and presentations over the past decade. At the outset is cited his 2003 paper “The Emergence of Order from Disorder as a Form of Self-Organization” in Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory (9/195) as an early analysis of hominid cultures which complexify via an “elaboration of individuation.” In so doing an “…odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization” is seen to transit from a Darwinian population of traits to an increasing influence of “relational” societal structures. This ascent involved (1) recognizing oneself as a distinct entity, (2) a “theory of mind” of other entities, and (3) a subsequent recursive group reciprocity.

Reeves, Jonathan, et al. Searching for the earliest archaeological record: insights from chimpanzee material landscapes.. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. August, 2024. JR, Lydia Luncz and Tomos Proffitt, Technological Primates Research Group, MPI Evolutionary Anthropology and Soiret Serge Pacome, Laboratoire de Zoologie et de Biologie Animale, Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa provide a latest detailed recovery of how our primate forebears learned how to make these initial implements.

The origin of tool use is a central issue in human evolutionary studies. Plio-Pleistocene core and flake methods represent the earliest evidence of tool use in the human lineage. Here, we present a landscape-scale study of the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) material culture from the Djouroutou Chimpanzee Project, Taï Forest, Cote d’Ivoire. This study explores the interplay between behavioural and environmental factors in shaping the stone record of nut cracking. We gain insight into the range of signatures that may be associated with a pre-core and flake archaeological record, providing new expectations for an earlier record of tool use. (Excerpt)

Renfrew, Colin and Chris Scarre, eds. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998. Papers from a conference to consider and apply the ideas of the Canadian neuroscientist Merlin Donald that human cultural evolution is due to a growing extrasomatic cognitive web and materially encoded representation.

Renfrew, Colin and Katie Boyle, eds. Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population History of Europe. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000. The use of molecular genetics to reconstruct the course of racial and cultural migrations.

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