Search Results

The modern human is a product of six million years of evolution wherein it is assumed that the ancestor of man resembles that of a chimpanzee. This assumption is based on the similarities of the ape-like brain size and post-cranial characteristics of the earliest hominid species to chimpanzees. Whilst it is unclear whether chimpanzees share the same foresight and contemplation of alternatives as with humans, it is nevertheless clear that chimpanzees lack creative imagination — an aspect of modern human imagination that sets humanity apart from its hominid ancestors. Creative imagination pertains to the ability to combine different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking to form creative and novel ideas. This chapter discusses seven critical steps in the evolution of the human imagination. These steps provide a clear picture of the gradual emergence of creative imagination in humans from their primitive origins as Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. This chronological evolution of the imaginative mind of humans involves both biological and cultural change that began soon after the divergence of the two lineages that led to modern humans and African apes.

This chapter provides an update on the speciation of modern Homo sapiens and the Out of Africa hypothesis. The majority of the fossil and genetic evidence favours an African origin for modern humans during the later part of the Middle Pleistocene (prior to 130,000 years ago), and one or more range expansions out of Africa after that date. However, a number of uncertainties remain. If there was a speciation event at the appearance of modern humans, what was its nature? Furthermore, did the evolution of modern human behaviour occur gradually or punctuationally? The discussion examines the difficulties faced in defining what is meant by ‘modern’ humans, and in reconstructing the morphological and behavioural origins of our species.

This chapter outlines the archaeological evidence for the relative recency and abruptness of appearance of artefacts associated with the creativity of modern humans. It compares the archaeological evidence associated with the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe and Africa. In Europe, there is a rapid appearance of new behavioural elements that are often seen to represent a ‘revolution’ in behavioural and perhaps cognitive terms, centred on c.43–35,000 years before present (BP). In Africa, new behavioural elements seem to appear in a more gradual, mosaic fashion but show many of the distinctive features of European Upper Palaeolithic culture by at least 70–80,000 (BP), including seemingly explicit evidence for fully symbolic expression. The central problem remains that of assessing how far these well-documented changes in the archaeological record reflect not only major shifts in behavioural patterns, but also underlying shifts in the cognitive capacities for behaviour, including increasing complexity in the structure of language.

How close were the Neanderthals to modern humans? Are Neanderthal genes in our gene pool? This chapter explores recent studies analyzing the DNA from Neanderthal fossils to provide a framework to address these and related questions. Based on these fossil DNA studies, it appears that little if any gene flow occurred between Neanderthals despite many centuries of these groups living in proximity. For this reason, Neanderthals and modern humans are likely separate species.

This chapter explores the methods of nutritional geometry on the modern human diet, applying the geometric approach to an analysis of a key aspect of human nutrition: the topical subject of human obesity. This analysis leads to three conclusions. First, the available evidence suggests that humans can regulate macronutrient intake, but that the intake target contains a built-in component for fat storage. Failure to use this stored fat promotes obesity. Second, when humans are faced with imbalanced diets, protein intake is prioritized. When the ratio of protein to carbohydrate in the diet is lower than optimal, it is easier to gain the required amount of protein—and hence overconsume fat and carbohydrate—when foods are high in energy density, present in great variety, and easily available throughout the day. Lastly, the regulation of nutrient intake in humans has evolved “assuming” a higher level of energetic expenditure than is usual today.

This chapter focuses on the engine of human imagination —the conceptual integration in which conceptual arrays are blended to form compressed, memorable conceptual packets, agreeable to human thought. The highest form of conceptual integration is the ‘double-scope’ integration. Double scope integration is the hallmark that distinguishes modern human imagination from its ancestors. The double-scope integration network consists of input conceptual arrays with different organizing frames and creates a blend with organizing frame that receives projections from each of those organizing frames. In this network, the organizing frames give contributions to the blend, and their sharp divergences offer the possibility for rich clashes. These clashes offer conceptual challenges and the resulting blends can turn out to be imaginative.

This chapter relates the story of how the discovery and spread of scientific knowledge regarding Stone-Age humans and their cultures profoundly changed understandings of anthropology at the time. In this version of the birth of human nature, an evolutionary leap had taken place through the tight interaction of several factors—increased brain size, bipedialism, family structure, a new ecology of life on the savannah, hunting and access to meat, and language—all caught in a maelstrom of positive feedback that resulted in the modern human. In the meantime, new fossil finds had revealed that Australopithecus, with a brain case about one-third the size of modern humans, appeared to use weapons and exhibited something that resembled proto-culture (both assertions were controversial). New primatological evidence, too, demonstrated that baboon and chimpanzee behavior were more complicated than anthropologists had previously thought possible. The former bright line between human and animal thus seemed more like a hazy stripe.

The earliest humans huddled around fires to listen to shamans and elders telling imaginative stories by which they made sense of their world and their lives in it. They told myths about the world's origins, and about how they as people came to be. In modern times, through progress, enlightenment, and cultural evolution, human now possess positive knowledge, scientific facts, and rational analysis. This is the dominant narrative by which modern humans make sense of their world and the purpose of their lives in it. This chapter raises question about the truth of this dominant narration. The point is that for all of their science, rationality, and technology, modern human beings are no less the makers, tellers, and believers of narrative construals of existence, history, and purpose than were their forefathers.

This chapter deals with the similarities and differences between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, by considering genetic, brain, and cognitive evidence. The genetic differentiation emerges from fossil genetic evidence obtained first from mtDNA and later from nuclear DNA. With high throughput whole genome sequencing, sequences have been obtained from the Denisova Cave (Siberia) fossils. Nuclear DNA of a third species (“Denisovans”) has been obtained from the same cave and used to define the phylogenetic relationships among the three species during the Upper Palaeolithic. Archaeological comparisons make it possible to advance a four-mode model of the evolution of symbolism. Neanderthals and modern humans would share a “modern mind” as defined up to Symbolic Mode 3. Whether the Neanderthals reached symbolic Mode 4 remains unsettled.

This chapter discusses the ethical issues raised by brain-computer interface (BCI) research in humans. It is organized around the three principles set out in the Belmont Report of 1978, which is generally considered the founding document of modern human research standards. The three principles are beneficence, respect for persons, and justice. Beneficence requires that the potential benefits of human research (to humanity and perhaps to the research subjects) far outweigh its risks to the subjects. Respect for persons requires that informed consent be obtained from the subjects. Justice requires that the benefits and burdens of the research be fairly distributed.

This chapter examines the fallacies of racialized medicine, and how an evolutionary approach to medicine can contribute toward the elimination of health disparities. Racialized medicine begins with the notion that biological races exist within modern humans, which follows that there are significant racialized differences in the prevalence of diseases between groups. Furthermore, racial medicine asserts that the predominant cause of these prevalence disparities is genetic differences. Thus, racial medicine would assert that doctors can reliably predict an individual's disease predisposition based on their race. On the other hand, evolutionary medicines's premise is that disease results from one or a combination of five basic causes: infection, novel environments, genes, design compromises, and evolutionary legacies. The chapter concludes by explaining how the use of racialized medicine illustrates the fact that mortality and morbidity have always been strongly influenced by social conditions.

Anatomically modern humans appeared at least 200,000 years ago, but there is little evidence for another 100,000 years of their acting much like modern humans. In trying to explain this “sapient paradox,” archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, paleogeneticists, and paleodemographers have recently moved toward the nuanced tracking of the lifeways and movements of ancient human populations. Their accounts, relying on new evidence especially from Africa, consider local environments, discrete human populations, and mosaic-like behavioral discontinuities, and they feature the capacity of early Homo sapiens (and, in lesser degree, Neandertals) to produce cultural difference in varying social and environmental settings. The discontinuity and disjunction emphasized in this view, in tandem with the emergence of traditions of cultural systems, discovers in early sapiens an unprecedented profile of short-term behavioral discontinuity and long-term deepening accumulation. The two sides of this dichotomy are reconciled in the feedforward effects of cultural epicycles, which led to convergent solutions among disparate human groups and to a buffering of the species as a whole from radical change through biological selection. All these forces operated in shaping the sapient lineages that emerged after 100,000 years ago and populated the modern world.

Human ancestry and human diversity are parts of the same origin narrative. Misrepresenting facts of human biology as natural facts, rather than as natural/cultural facts, has historically been the source of scientific justifications for conservative political policies. The image that most accurately represents the metaphoric structure of human evolution is the rhizome or trellis, not the tree. Culture permeates human biology both as an ultimate cause (the ancient coevolution of technology, dexterity, and cognition), and as proximate cause (modern phenotypes develop in local contexts). Consequently, the idea of a “human nature” independent of culture is a pre-evolutionary concept. Likewise, the fallacy of “race” lies in its misrepresentation as a natural category, when it is actually a “natural/cultural” category.

This chapter discusses the origins of the human species on earth, in part to emphasize the fact that we are social animals. The story of human evolution spans millions of years, although it is not easy to establish a starting date or to draw an easy narrative line across those immense stretches of time. The evidence available to us is a spare collection of fossil remains dug out of the ground in widely scattered parts of the world, and a good deal of significance can be given each skull fragment or bone splinter or tooth. The chapter considers the appearance of the early hominins, the australopithecines and how they became social. It also looks at the first humans as well as modern humans, noting how they made the transition from foraging to agriculture.

This chapter looks at how humans have developed two features related to the coded information stored in neural networks that made them unique among all living organisms. First, humans have developed the ability to translate information into externalized mental representation. Second, they have developed creativity—the ability to combine and recombine that information with a sufficient number of elements. The subsequent formation of the super-brain among modern human organizations has spurred properties not previously observed in organic evolution, which brings up two questions: what would be the impact on humanity of an entity with vastly superior computational and creative powers than humans? What would be the role of humans in such a world, or of any life-forms for that matter?

We take for granted a theory of human nature that Charles Taylor has called “expressivism.” Expressivism shows how individuals are shaped by their communities (through language and culture) and how individuals shape their communities (each act expresses the personality of the actor, thereby subtly shifting the language and culture available to the actors’ contemporaries and cultural successors). Expressivism ties individual and group identity together. It lies at the core of our modern ideas of religion and race because it shows why these groups are central to our identity, and why membership in religious and racial groups shapes the ways we think and act. Though Herder attacks Kant’s race theories, and Schleiermacher is an early and robust pluralist, both are key figures in the construction of the Western anthropology of expressivism that makes modern race-thinking possible and ties race to religious groups.

Crucial questions in the debate on the origin of quintessential human behaviours are whether modern cognition and associated innovations are unique to our species and whether they emerged abruptly, gradually or as the result of a discontinuous process. Three scenarios have been proposed to account for the origin of cultural modernity. The first argues that modern cognition is unique to our species and the consequence of a genetic mutation that took place approximately 50 ka in Africa among already evolved anatomically modern humans. The second posits that cultural modernity emerged gradually in Africa starting at least 200 ka in concert with the origin of our species on that continent. The third states that innovations indicative of modern cognition are not restricted to our species and appear and disappear in Africa and Eurasia between 200 and 40 ka before becoming fully consolidated. We evaluate these scenarios in the light of new evidence from Africa, Asia and Europe and explore the mechanisms that may have led to modern cultures. Such reflections will demonstrate the need for further inquiry into the relationship between climate and demographic/cultural change in order to better understand the mechanisms of cultural transmission at work in Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens populations.

This chapter examines the challenges that hominins occupying higher latitudes have had to deal with. More specifically, it analyses how hominins were able to maintain social networks over the larger geographic areas associated with decreasing population densities at higher latitudes, along with the mechanisms by which the largest encompassing groups can be maintained. The chapter first considers what the term ‘group’ means before discussing the apparent trends in hominin group size and social organisation over time. It then explains why it is important to maintain extended community networks and the cognitive and time budgeting challenges presented by higher latitudes. It also compares Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in terms of network sizes and in maintaining their extended social networks.