ORIGINAL PAPER Human evolution and cognition (original) (raw)
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An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens
Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2008
Human beings are unique in their possession of language and symbolic consciousness. Yet there is no doubt that modern Homo sapiens is descendedfrom a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic ancestor. How might this extraordinary transition have occurred? Slow fine-tuning over the eons is not the answer: the apparent steadiness in hominid brain enlargement over the past two myr is probably an artifact of inadequate systematics, while behavioral innovation was highly episodic in human evolution, and nonsynchronic with anatomical innovation. Evidence for expression of symbolic behaviors appears only very late-substantially after Homo sapiens had arrived as an anatomical entity. Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that "exapted" the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be "discovered" culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitionshaving given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for "adaptedness" in modern human behaviors.
On the Emergence of Modern humans
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The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020
How did human symbolic behavior evolve? Dating up to about 100,000 y ago, the engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell fragments from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provide a unique window into presumed early symbolic traditions of Homo sapiens and how they evolved over a period of more than 30,000 y. Using the engravings as stimuli, we report five experiments which suggest that the engravings evolved adaptively, becoming better-suited for human perception and cognition. More specifically, they became more salient, memorable, reproducible, and expressive of style and human intent. However, they did not become more discriminable over time between or within the two archeological sites. Our observations provide support for an account of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings as decorations and as socially transmitted cultural traditions. By contrast, there was no clear indication that they served as denotational symbolic signs. Our findings have broad implications f...
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1998
with trees from large numbers of sequences 62 3.3.3 Results from re-analysing the data 62 3.3.4 When, where, who, and how 64 3.3.4.1 When and where 64 3.3.4.2 Dating trees with archaeological evidence 3.3.4.3 Who and how 66 3.4 Trees of human relationships from nuclear genetic data 66 3.4.1 Alleles and polymorphisms 66 3.4.2 Ingroup dating of the tree xii Contents 3.5 Conclusions and prospects 69 Epilogue 70 Notes 71 References 4. Evolution of the human brain:Ralph Holloway 74 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The human brain 4.3 Lines of evidence regarding human brain evolution 4.4 Palaeoneurological evidence 87 4.4.1 Brain size 87 4.4.1.1 Absolute brain size 87 4.4.1.2 Encephalization quotients 89 4.4.2 Organization of the brain 90 4.4.2.1 Relative increase in parietal lobe association cortex 90 4.4.2.2 A more human-like third inferior frontal convolution 91 4.4.2.3 Asymmetries of the brain and laterality 4.4.2.4 Towards a synthesis 95 4.5 Conclusion 97 Appendix: Sexual dimorphism and the brain 98 Notes 100 References Editorial appendix I: Endocranial volumes Editorial appendix II: Evolution of the human vocal apparatus 116 5. Evolution of the hand and bipedality: Mary W. Marzke 126 5.1 Introduction 126 5.2 Non-human primate hands 5.2.1 Hand morphology shared by primates 5.2.2 The hand of the Great Apes 128 5.3 Human hands 130 5.3.1 The morphological basis of tool-use in humans 131 5.3.2 Contribution of bipedality to tool-use 5.3.3 The brain, the hand, and tool-use 5.4 Fossil hominoid hands and locomotor apparatus 5.4.1 Miocene fossil Hominoidea 135 5.4.2 Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Hominidae 137 5.4.3 Middle Pleistocene 5.4.4 Late Pleistocene 141 5.5 Origin and evolution of the hominid hand and bipedality 142 5.5.1 The evidence from the comparative morphology of extant primates 142 5.5.2 The fossil evidence 143 5.5.3 The hand and the origin of bipedality 144 5.5.4 New perspectives on the role of tool-use and tool-making in the evolution of the hominid hand and bipedality 144 3 Evolutionary trees of apes and humans from DNA sequences
This research uses Peircean Semiotics to model the evolution of symbolic behavior in the human lineage and the potential material correlates of this evolutionary process in the archaeological record. The semiotic model states the capacity for symbolic behavior developed in two distinct stages. Emergent capacities are characterized by the sporadic use of non-symbolic and symbolic material culture that affects information exchange between individuals. Symbolic exchange will be rare. Mobilized capacities are defined by the constant use of non-symbolic and symbolic objects that affect both interpersonal and group-level information exchange. Symbolic behavior will be obligatory and widespread. The model was tested against the published archaeological record dating from ~200,000 years ago to the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary in three sub-regions of Africa and Eurasia. A number of Exploratory and Confirmatory Data Analysis techniques were used to identify patterning in artifacts through time consistent with model predictions. The results indicate Emergent symboling capacities were expressed as early as ~100,000 years ago in Southern Africa and the Levant. However, capacities do not appear fully Mobilized in these regions until ~17,000 years ago. Emergent symboling is not evident in the European record until ~42,000 years ago, but develops rapidly. The results also indicate both Anatomically Modern Humans and Neanderthals had the capacity for symbolic behavior, but expressed those capacities differently. Moreover, interactions between the two populations did not select for symbolic expression, nor did periodic aggregation within groups. The analysis ultimately situates the capacity for symbolic behavior in increased engagement with materiality and the ability to recognize material objects can be made meaningful– an ability that must have been shared with Anatomically Modern Humans’ and Neanderthals’ most recent common ancestor. Consequently, the results have significant implications for notions of ‘modernity’ and human uniqueness that drive human origins research. This work pioneers deductive approaches to cognitive evolution, and both strengths and weaknesses are discussed. In offering notable results and best practices, it effectively operationalizes the semiotic model as a viable analytical method for human origins research.
1 The Origins of Modern Cognition
2014
This paper argues that ritual behavior was a critical selective force in the emergence of modern cognition. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) About 70,000 years before present (ybp) hominins faced an ecological crisis resulting from the massive Toba eruption. (2) Genetic and archeological evidence indicate that some anatomically modern humans (AMH), but no archaic species, arrived at a social solution to this crisis in the form of expanded reciprocal inter-group trade alliances. (3) Increased inter-group interactions put pressure on many hominin social/cognitive abilities, but most critically on ritual behavior. (4) Increasingly sophisticated social rituals arose in order to establish inter-group trust and to ensure intra-group solidarity. (5) Ritual behavior placed demands on attention and working memory, creating a Baldwinian pathway for the emergence of modern cognition by virtue of a modest enhancement of working memory capacity. Evidence for each of these...
New thinking about the evolution of human cognition
Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene -culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.
Cognitive archaeology has undergone a quiet revolution in the past three to five years. What was once the study of a paltry prehistoric record is now open to the unlimited potential of modern neuroscience. Cognitive archaeology seeks to answer one of the most difficult questions in archaeology: What were these people thinking? In the distant past of the origin of genus Homo, the archaeological record reveals precious little information. The dawn of the modern human mind, perhaps the most important event in the history of life, was shrouded in unsolvable mystery. Until recently we were limited to a very narrow field of inquiry: the symmetry of tools, the spatial organization of sites, the first evidence of symbolism, and the growing complexity of technology. In 1976, Alexander Marshack argued for a very early origin of symbolism in the Mousterian, replete with personal adornment and ritual shamanism. The early origin of symbolism is supported today by Francesco d'Errico and Joao Zilhao, who have provided ample evidence for Neanderthals' and other archaic Homo advanced cognitive abilities, expressed in their symbolic material culture. At the same time, Margarent Conkey began the modern era of Paleolithic art interpretation by critiquing anthropologists' artificial categories. In 2000, McBrearty and Brooks summarized the evolution of human cognition and the history of cognitive archaeology in their article "The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior." Their conclusions align with Marshack's of 25 years earlier, that around 300,000 years ago the modern human mind began to appear in the archaeological record, and that behaviors that were previously limited, by predominant theories in archaeology, to the European 3 Upper Paleolithic were easily visible in the African Middle Stone Age. Determining what 'modern behavior' itself is has been half of the debate.
Language as a Critical Factor in the Emergence of Human Cognition
Modern human beings are most sharply distinguished from all other organisms alive today by their possession of symbolic reasoning, the cognitive capacity that makes possible the mental construction of alternative versions of the world. Scrutiny of the human fossil and archaeological records reveals that, while brain sizes expanded independently in several hominid lineages over the course of the Pleistocene, this qualitatively distinctive symbolic faculty only emerged in our own. What is more, this acquisition was made remarkably recently: well within the 200,000-year tenure on Earth of our anatomically distinctive species Homo sapiens. The earliest anatomical Homo sapiens appear to have behaved in much the same manner as their non-symbolic contemporaries, although it is highly likely that they had acquired the neural wiring necessary for symbolic thought in the same event of developmental reorganization that gave Homo sapiens its strikingly derived bony morphology. Only subsequent to about 100,000 years ago do archaeological traces suggest that our forebears had actually begun to think symbolically. This implies that the new capacity was released by a purely cultural stimulus (after all, the biology was necessarily already in place). I suggest that cultural trigger involved was the spontaneous invention of language by members of a small population isolate of Homo sapiens in Africa, at some time after about 100,000 years ago. Structured, rule-bound language is intricately intertwined with symbolic thought as we experience it today; and it is possible to conceive at least in principle how each could have fed back into the other to create a new dynamic.