Evolution of Human Cognition

Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).

This teaching aid reviews the major evolutionary landmarks that over the last sixty million years marked the development of intelligence in Homo sapiens. The discussion begins with social primates and charts the adaptations that ultimately led to the emergence of modern humans including the growth of the brain, increased manual dexterity, and evolution of language. Also considered are adaptations to allow for the digestion of starch, and their impact on early agriculture, the first use of fire and cooking. Discussion includes consideration of the following gene mutations: RNF213 GENE, HAR1 GENE, ARHGAP11B GENE, SLC2A1 GENE, SLC2A4 GENE, HACNS1 GENE, MYH16 GENE, SRGAP2 GENE, FOXP2 GENE, AMY1 GENE

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, HUMAN EVOLUTION, EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, LANGUAGE, GENETICS, HOMO SAPIEN, HOMO HABILIS, AUSTRALOPITHECINES, PRIMATES, CHIMPANZEE, GORILLA, GELADA, MOYAMOYA DISEASE, CAROTID ARTERY, HOMININ, WONDERWERK CAVE, SOUTH AFRICA, STARCH DIET, MEAT DIET, RNF213 GENE MUTATIONS, HAR1 GENE, ARHGAP11B GENE, SLC2A1 GENE, SLC2A4 GENE, HACNS1 GENE, MYH16 GENE, SRGAP2 GENE, FOXP2 GENE, AMY1 GENE

Many of us have some vague notion that religion emerged in the "childhood of humankind." Not yet schooled in the ways of common sense (let alone modern science), pitiful humans could only tremble in fear when the heavens thundered and huddle in caves when lightning flashed. They ensouled not just creatures, but plants, rocks, and mountains, as they populated the world with fierce and fearsome entities. Our ancestors were simply confused. We rational moderns, more advanced and fortunate, can forgive them in the same way we unthinkingly let pass the endearing ignorance of a small child who believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. As humankind graduated from early education of times past and dark, it marched towards the illuminating light of Enlightenment knowledge.

“This book is extremely well-written and in my view is among the best synthesizers in human evolution study. Dwight provides a much-needed clarity and guidance on what makes us humans. I strongly recommended.”  Amazon (Independent Reviewer), Dr. Paulo Finuras, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisbon

“Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame

“How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much.  My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …”  Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville

“… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California

Abstract
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.

Hier soll auf Steiners frühe Gedanken zum Begriff der Entwicklung anhand seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der Organik Goethes und mit dem zeitgenössischen Darwinismus aufmerksam gemacht werden. Sie sind durch spätere Fortschritte seiner Erkenntnis weder überholt noch überflüssig geworden: Er hat sie nicht verlassen, sondern ausdifferenziert und ergänzt. In dieser prägnanten Weise sind sie sonst jedoch in seinem Werk kaum zu finden.

Kinship plays a foundational role in organizing human social behavior on both local and more global scales. Hence, any adequate account of the evolution of human sociality must include an account of the evolution of human kinship. This article aims to make progress on the latter task by providing a few key pieces of an evolutionary model of kinship systems. The article is especially focused on the connection between primate social cognition and the origins of kinship systems. I argue that early conceptions of kinship in our line were very likely scaffolded by preexisting forms of primate social cognition. It was only later, as linguistic resources increased in our line, and as human social life grew more complex, that these conceptions came to resemble kin categories as we now know them. I conclude by situating “kin cognition” within a broader cognitive science framework for studying capacities that reflect both innate knowledge and human cultural learning.

In this paper we argue for a relational perspective based on metaphorical rather than semiotic understandings of human and hominin material culture. The corporeality of material culture and thus its role as solid metaphors for a shared experience of
embodiment precedes language in the archaeological record. While arguments continue as to both the cognitive abilities that underpin symbolism and the necessary and sufficient
evidence for the identification of symbolic material culture in the archaeological record, a symbolic approach will inevitably restrict the available data to sapiens or even to literate
societies. However, a focus on material culture as material metaphor allows consideration of the ways in which even the very earliest archaeological record reflects hominins’ embodied, distributed relationships with heterogeneous forms of agent, as will be demonstrated by two case studies.

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.

Life of the upright man started a lot earlier then, with the advent of gods and the division between them, the earth had split. The development of the human race Previous studies of genetic origin and analysis of fossil remains of primates of different ages allow us to transparently reconstruct important events and turning points in the evolution of the human race. Methodological approach can reach far into the past and follow the development of a man almost to the moment when one branch of hominids (members of the family Hominidae, great apes) allocated from the hominoids (superfamily members of the Hominoidae primates). Hominids were followed by subfamilies and tribes of the homonin from which the genus Homo evolved and eventually became the modern type of man, the Homo sapiens. It is safe to say that the last ancestor, who was a common ancestor to man and primates, such as chimpanzees, lived more than five million years ago. The first upright man, the common ancestor of all people lived in areas of Africa more than 1.5 million years ago. He was a man of the hominin tribe and by genus a Homo erectus. Descendants and later generations of Homo erectus settled gradually, apart from Africa, in areas of Europe and Asia, where they evolved through a number of species and subspecies, from Homo antecessora, Heidelberg, Rhodesian and Beijing man to Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, etc. The human species Homo sapiens appears in one continuous development of vertical men, becoming more distinct and separated by habitat, their geographic area. It is primarily on the African, European (Mediterranean) and the Asian pool and a time frame between 200,000-70,000 years ago that this happened. Thus, starting with Homo erectus, a common African ancestor, ancestors of archaic and modern humans in Europe were the Homo anteccesor, Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal, and the ancestors of modern humans in Asia were Homo georgicus the Peking Man, and in Africa, Homo ergaster, Homo gautengensis, Homo rhodensiensis and the African type of the Heidelberg man. Their common ancestor, Homo erectus evolved from the Homo habilis species, whose ancestors have been in the genus Australopithecus africanus, one of transitional forms in the development of hominids. Somehow, with the appearance of an upright man begins and lasts a period of making the most primitive stone tools. A sharp point at the top aloof sharpened stone served as the oldest known ancestor of the upright man, Homo habilis. Remains of primitive stone tools from the time of Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other species and subspecies of humans is the so-called Pebble culture, a term coined by French paleontologists to refer to the complete body of work of making the oldest stone tools. The continuity of development from Homo habilis to archaic and modern humans shows-from subspecies to subspecies-a series of anatomical changes that are reflected in an upright and secure body position, a greater height and longer lower limbs, changes in shape of the head, a greater cranial cavity and also the continuously growing, heavier and more developed brain.

To appear in Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy (ed. Killin, A., & Allen-Hermanson, S.): There is growing acceptance among language evolution researchers that an increase in our ancestors' theory of mind capacities was critical to the origins of language. However, little attention has been paid to the question of how those capacities were in fact upgraded. This article develops a novel hypothesis, grounded in contemporary cognitive neuroscience, on which our theory of mind capacities improved as a result of an increase in our System-2 thinking capacities, in turn based in an increase in our working memory capacities. I contrast this hypothesis with what would appear to be the default position among language evolution researchers, namely, that our theory of mind became more powerful as a result of genetic change to a domain-specific mindreading system which we share with other great apes. While the latter hypothesis is not implausible, it arguably enjoys less empirical support at present than does the alternative hypothesis I develop.

O emprego da violência interpessoal tem destaque no conjunto de instrumentos comportamentais de uma ampla gama de espécies que habitam ou habitaram o Planeta, e é algo que representa um diferencial evolucionário na competição individual pelas fontes de subsistência e no sucesso reprodutivo, em determinadas circunstâncias ecológicas. O consistente desenvolvimento da vida social, em curso desde a adoção de hábitos diurnos há 52 Ma, e amplamente potencializado com a formação de pares ou de haréns a partir de algumas espécies da família Hominidae por volta de 16-12 Ma, além de funcionar, ele próprio, como uma inovação comportamental adaptativa, gerou um contexto complexo que levaria o exercício da violência e do poder a ganhar novas dimensões, milhões de anos depois. Em âmbito interno aos grupos sociais, o exercício da força associar-se-ia a estratégias sociais envolvendo intricadas ritualizações e o sutil emprego de estratagemas e subterfúgios, incluindo nas ferinas disputas por status a formação de alianças em torno de objetivos comuns. No âmbito externo, a projeção de poder também viria a superar a antediluviana tendência, frequente nos mamíferos, às disputas entre indivíduos, dando origem à novidade evolucionária consubstanciada no fenômeno da violência coalizacional. Surgiam, então, genuínas relações sociais de poder que ultrapassavam, embora incorporassem, a mera instância interpessoal, assumindo uma dimensão coletiva e intersocietária. É nesse sentido que a intensa sociabilidade demonstrada pelos grandes primatas antropoides estantes – excetuando os orangotangos, do gênero Pongo – sugere um interessante emaranhamento entre o social e a dinâmica evolutiva, entre a vida coletiva, com sua lógica de cooperação e conflito intra e intergrupal, e aquele domínio vitorianamente consagrado ao indivíduo (a origem e evolução das espécies). E de forma mais específica, são traços compartilhados entre P. troglodytes e H. sapiens – os chimpanzés comuns e os humanos modernos –, adequados integralmente ao portfólio comportamental descrito, que nos fazem imaginar que tanto a violência coalizacional quanto a projeção de poder interssocietária possam se configurar como uma condição sinapomórfica  , desenvolvida e transmitida no decurso evolucionário de algumas espécies da subfamília Homininae, com laços filogenéticos entre si, e que remetem pelo menos ao último ancestral comum (UAC) entre os gêneros Pan e Homo.
Assim, o desenvolvimento da violência coalizacional e da projeção de poder interssocietária teria percorrido uma senda evolucionária de ao menos seis milhões de anos, gerando uma identidade elusiva entre os reides promovidos por bandos de chimpanzés contra grupos vizinhos rivais nas florestas equatoriais da África Central, os massacres que marcaram a vivência social de H. sapiens durante a Última Era Glacial, e os dantescos choques entre sociedades organizadas em Estados, no curtíssimo intervalo entre o surgimento da agricultura, há aproximadamente dez mil anos, e os tempos atuais. Esse fenômeno de longuíssima duração, a filogenia da guerra, superaria absolutamente a percepção subjetiva de seus agentes históricos (fosse pela sua própria condição, fosse pela ausência de instrumentos cognitivos para o conceito de temporalidade), e, operando num pano de fundo inconsciente, estrutural, tensionaria e problematizaria dialeticamente cada episódio envolvendo o poder e a guerra em temporalidades mais curtas, sem determiná-los.

In A Million Years of Music, Gary Tomlinson develops an extensive evolutionary narrative that emphasises several important components of human musicality and proposes a theory of the coalescence of these components. In this essay I tie some of Tomlinson’s ideas to five constraints on theories of music’s evolution. This provides the framework for organising my reconstruction of his model. Thereafter I focus on Tomlinson’s description of 'entraining' Acheulean toolmakers and offer several criticisms. I close with some tentative proposals for further theorising.

Since the appearance in the archaeological record of anatomically modern humans at least some 150,000 years ago, human cultural evolution has massively outstripped genetic or biological changes in a pattern of development that may yet prove to be exponential in form. In our case, why do biological and cultural evolution appear not to co-evolve as might be expected? This is, essentially, the sapient paradox.

Drawing on recent explorations of the evolution of Mind and of the social brain, this paper offers, albeit tentatively, an entirely biological explanation of cultural evolution based on a theory of cognition proposed by the biologists and systems theorists Humberto Maturana and the late Francisco Varela. Their theory is known as the biology of cognition (BoC), or more widely as autopoietic theory. Central to the BoC is the radically different explanation of language and conversation. It is from this that an explanation is developed for an apparent, and only apparent, separation of biological and cultural evolution, and for the latter’s potentially exponential pattern.

Very briefly, the intention of this paper is to develop an explanation of the sapient paradox based on an unconventional, possibly paradigm shaking, understanding of the nature of the relationship between the human organism and its environment, and the mechanism(s) through which it is maintained. Drawing on the BoC and the work of complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman, this human organism-medium system (HO-MS), a unit of analysis covering both material and social engagement, is shown to be a non-linear or complex system, an unstable system the behaviour of which is inherently unpredictable. In this specifically human case, instability is such that it may be described as supracritical, a system that, if not attenuated or slowed down in some way, will destroy itself in an explosive process of spontaneous restructuring. What slows down this process in the case of the HO-MS is the very thing it produces—the objects that constitute material culture and the social structures precipitated around them. What quickens the pace of change in material culture production? Conversations.

Conversations, described as the intertwined flow of languaging and emotioning, are the implied mechanism in both system stabilisation (conservation of structural relations) and destabilisation. Understanding the nature of conversations, or to be more precise, the nature of overlapping networks of conversation as inherently supracritical systems is the beginning of an explanation of the sapient paradox.

With reference to processes of tool invention, material engagement and the diffusion and evolution of practices (innovation), the paper will include model systems with which to explain periods of so-called revolutions e.g., the human and Neolithic revolutions, and their situatedness and the role of conversations in the development, fusion and the fission of social groups and distinct cultural spaces.

Data for the dating of the earliest human art from cave sites at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia; Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Chauvet in southern France, and Altamira and El Castillo in Spain are reviewed. Arguments that western Europe was the locus for the development of artistic expression are evaluated and challenged in the light of the dates obtained for Maros cave. The weight of evidence now points to the widespread presence of parietal art across the Eurasian continent from c.40,000 BP, the ultimate origin of which may lie in the African continent c.60,000 BP. This contradicts the Eurocentric notion that a creative explosion took place uniquely in western Europe c.40,000, leading to the establishment of human culture. A further consequence of the dating evidence from Maros cave is to undermine the theory that Neanderthals were the creator of the earliest cave art. As the distribution of Neanderthals was limited to Europe they cannot be relied upon to explain paintings in Asia, which either predate or are contemporary with those found in Europe.

KEYWORDS
PLEISTOCENE, UPPER PALAEOLITHIC, ORIGINS OF ART, PARIETAL ART, CAVE ART, MAROS CAVE, LASCAUX CAVE, PECH MERLE CAVE, CHAUVET CAVE, ALTAMIRA CAVE, EL CASTILLO CAVE, NEANDERTHAL, CREATIVE EXPLOSION, COGNITION

Intention recognition is ubiquitous in most social interactions among humans and other primates. Despite this, the role of intention recognition in the emergence of cooperative actions remains elusive. Resorting to the tools of evolutionary game theory, herein we describe a computational model showing how intention recognition co-evolves with cooperation in populations of self-regarding individuals. By equipping some individuals with the capacity of assessing the intentions of others in the course of a prototypical dilemma of cooperation – the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma –, we show how intention recognition is favored by natural selection, opening a window of opportunity for cooperation to thrive. We introduce a new strategy (IR) that is able to assign an intention to the actions of opponents, on the basis of an acquired corpus consisting of possible plans achieving that intention, as well as to then make decisions on the basis of such recognized intentions. The success of IR is grounded on the unshameful exploitation of unconditional cooperators whilst remaining robust against unconditional defectors. In addition, we show how intention recognizers do indeed prevail against the most famous successful strategies of iterated dilemmas of cooperation, even in the presence of errors and reduction of fitness associated with a small cognitive cost for performing intention recognition.

Mobile carrying devices-slings, bags, boxes, containers, etc.-are a ubiquitous tool form among recent human communities. So ingrained are they to our present life-ways that the fundamental relationship between mobile containers and foresight is easily overlooked, resulting in their significance in the study of human cognitive development being largely unrecognized. Exactly when this game-changing innovation appeared and became an essential component of the human toolkit is currently unknown. Taphonomic processes are obviously a significant factor in this situation; however, we argue that these devices have also not received the attention that they deserve from human evolution researchers. Here we discuss what the current archeological evidence is for Pleistocene-aged mobile containers and outline the various lines of evidence that they provide for the origins and development of human cognitive and cultural behavior.

he European Upper Palaeolithic is well known for its outstanding art and symbolic objects. The early phase of these cultural expressions is connected to the Aurignacian dating to c. 43-34 calibrated thousand years before present (ka cal bp 1-5). Early examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art are reported from northern Spain and southern France, including those from Grotte Chauvet 6,7. The Chauvet paintings most probably represent two phases dating to 37-33.5 and 31-28 ka cal bp 8. In Central Europe, the earliest musical instruments as well as anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ivory figurines are associated with Aurignacian layers in four caves in the Swabian Jura 9,10. Most famous is the so-called lion man from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave 11. Female figurines from Aurignacian layers at Hohle Fels and Stratzing in Lower Austria constitute the earliest human figurines in Europe 12,13. Recently, the Bachokirian in Southeastern Europe has been assigned to Homo sapiens, and cave bear tooth pendants dating to 45.5 ka cal bp were reported too 14. Today, there is no doubt that a broad spectrum of symbolic behaviour including elaborate mobile and sophisticated cave art is connected to early H. sapiens in various parts of Europe. By contrast, extensive debates surround the question of early hominins' and Neanderthals' cognitive capacities, particularly regarding the ability to create art and symbolic expressions. There is now considerable evidence for elaborate lithic technology 15,16 , manufacture of effective wooden weapons and bone tools 17-25. Also, the production of birch tar adhesives and composite tools is attested for Neanderthals 26,27. Evidence of personal adornment and symbolic behaviour in Neanderthals, however, is sparse and, if present, it is often debated whether it was in fact adopted through interactions with early H. sapiens 14,28-30. Personal adornment in the form of bone and tooth pendants from the Châtelperronian sites Arcy-sur-Cure and Quinçay in Western Europe has been discussed in that context 31,32. Furthermore, the wearing of bird feathers, talons and phalanges as jewellery has been suggested at various sites in Southern and Western Europe 33-36. Middle Palaeolithic cave art was also recently reported from the Iberian caves La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales, based on uranium-thorium dating of calcretes that cover simple wall paintings and a hand stencil 37. The early age of this cave art, however, is currently subject to debate 38-40. A few bone and rock items engraved with geometric line patterns have been reported in Neanderthal contexts, but some remain ambiguous 30,41-47. While there is little doubt that 'symbolic behaviour' in Neanderthals has been underestimated in the past, for the moment it remains an open question to what extent complex expressions of symbolic behaviour and art were present in Central Europe before the arrival of early H. sapiens. Our findings contribute important new information to this discussion. Located at ~51° N, Einhornhöhle in Lower Saxony, Germany, is situated along the northern boundary of the world known to be inhabited by Neanderthals. Here, we present an engraved bone that was discovered during recent excavations at the former cave entrance (layer 4.5; Fig. 1). Results The engraved bone from Einhornhöhle. Site and find context. Einhornhöhle was formed by chemical dissolution of dolomitic rock during the Tertiary period in the Harz Mountains 48. It is a well-known Quaternary fossil site that has been frequented by treasure hunters since the Middle Ages, aiming to extract what they believed to be unicorn fossils. The first Middle Palaeolithic artefacts were found in 1985 in the Jacob-Friesen Gallery 49-51 (Supplementary Information, and Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2).

New developments in neuroimaging have demonstrated that the basic capacities underpinning
human social skills are shared by our closest extant primate relatives. The challenge for archaeologists
is to explain how complex human societies evolved from this shared pattern of face-to-face social
interaction. We argue that a key process was the gradual incorporation of material culture into social
networks over the course of hominin evolution. Here we use three long-term processes in hominin
evolution—encephalization, the global human diaspora and sedentism/agriculture—to illustrate how
the cultural transmission ofmaterial culture allowed the ‘scaling up’ of face-to-face social interactions
to the global societies known today. We conclude that future research by neuroimagers and
archaeologists will need to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind human engagement with
material culture as well as other persons.

Few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas as the evolution of cooperation. As a result, several mechanisms have been identified to work as catalyzers of cooperative behavior. Yet, these studies, mostly grounded on evolutionary dynamics and game theory, have neglected the important role played by intention recognition in behavioral evolution. Here we address explicitly this issue, characterizing the dynamics emerging from a population of intention recognizers. We derive a Bayesian Network model for intention recognition in the context of repeated social dilemmas and evolutionary game theory, by assessing the internal dynamics of trust between intention recognizers and their opponents. Intention recognizers are then able to predict the next move of their opponents based on past direct interactions, which, in turn, enables them to prevail over the most famous strategies of repeated dilemmas of cooperation, even in presence of noise. Overall, our framework offers new insights on the complexity and beauty of behavioral evolution driven by elementary forms of cognition.

While there is substantial evidence for art and symbolic behaviour in early Homo sapiens across Africa and Eurasia, similar evidence connected to Neanderthals is sparse and often contested in scientific debates. Each new discovery is thus crucial for our understanding of Neanderthals' cognitive capacity. Here we report on the discovery of an at least 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, northern Germany. The find comes from an apparent Middle Palaeolithic context that is linked to Neanderthals. The engraved bone demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in Neanderthals. Therefore, Neanderthal's awareness of symbolic meaning is very likely. Our findings show that Neanderthals were capable of creating symbolic expressions before H. sapiens arrived in Central Europe.

Elucidation of the evolutionary context in which the earliest production of humanly-made, intentional markings occurred is hampered by several factors: a lack of adequate resolution in the relevant archaeological 'record'; a failure by many commentators to consider the effects of taphonomic selection on this 'record'; archaeological biases against evidence purported to relate to early cognitive capacities; inadequate familiarity of some protagonists with the available relevant evidence; archaeological conservatism predicated on the durability of non-refutable propositions; and an epistemologically slanted approach which interprets lack of a specific class of evidence as denoting historical absence of the phenomenon it is thought to represent. Contending with these and other formidable biases, the writer reviews the Lower Palaeolithic evidence, as well as some from the Middle Palaeolithic, which seems to permit glimpses of the cognitive and technological capacities of hominids. He rejects the general concept of abrupt transitions between the major phases of the Palaeolithic, arguing that such models can be accounted for by plateaus derived from taphonomy, methodology, dating techniques and the archaeological penchant for creating cultural taxonomies. A more gradual evolution of cognitive faculties is favoured, beginning with the Lower Palaeolithic, for which the existence of archaic concept-mediated marking behaviour is suggested.

The aim of this article is to set a macro-historical narrative concerning the emergence of warfare and social ethics as symplesiomorphic features in the lineage of Homo sapiens. This means that these two behavioral aspects, representative of a very selected branch in the phylogenetic tree of the Primate order, are shared by the two lineages of great African apes that diverged from a common ancestor around six million years in the past, leading to extant humans and chimpanzees. Therefore, this article proposes an ethological understanding of warfare and social ethics, as both are innate to the social high-specialized modular mind present in the species of genera Pan and Homo. However behavioral restraints to intersocietal coalitionary violence seems to be an exclusive aspect of the transdominial modular cognition that characterizes modern humans. Thus, if in the evolutionary long durée, warfare and restrictions to intrasocial violence both appear to be ethologically common to humans and chimpanzees to a certain extent, an ethics of warfare - and, of course, the cognitive capability for intersocietal peace - seems to be distinctly human.

Nova Science Publishers

DISCUSSIONS WITH JULIAN JAYNES: THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE VAGARIES OF PSYCHOLOGY

In 1976 the late Julian Jaynes of Princeton University published the groundbreaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which he argued that before the twelfth century BCE the minds of individuals were of a different neurocultural organization.  Rather than being consciously self-aware as we think of it, the behavior of our ancient predecessors was governed by religiously-inflected “voices” and visions.  Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Julian Jaynes, took the opportunity in 1991 to record a series of informal, wide-ranging, and unstructured discussions with this controversial maverick of the psychology world.  Weaving their way in and out of the discussions are the following themes: the clarification of concepts and the meaning of “consciousness”; the relation between linguistics and consciousness and language study as a crucial method to reveal this relation; the history of psychology and the prejudices of mainstream psychology (e.g., the marginalization of consciousness as a research topic, ignoring socio-historical aspects of psyche, the significance of religion, the fraudulence of Freudianism, the overuse, vagueness, and emptiness of “cognitive,” problems with establishment psychology, and the sociology of knowledge); and some practical implications of Jaynes’s ideas on consciousness.  This book will appeal to anyone interested in the emergence of consciousness, language and cognition, cultural psychology, the history of psychology, and the neurocultural transformation of our species.  A Glossary of Names provides useful historical context. 

CONTENTS

Preface Julian Jaynes—The “Darwin of Psychology”

Chapter 1 Key Themes of the Discussions
Clarification of Concepts and the Meaning of “Consciousness”
The Centrality of Evolution
Language Study as Crucial: How Linguistics Relates to Conscious Interiority
Mainstream Psychology: Its History and Prejudices
Practical Implications of Jaynes’s Ideas

Chapter 2 June 2, 1991 Session

Chapter 3 June 5, 1991 Session

Chapter 4 June 7, 1991 Session

Appendix A: Features of Conscious Interiority

Appendix B: Glossary of Names

References

About the Author

Index

While there is substantial evidence for art and symbolic behaviour in early Homo sapiens across Africa and Eurasia, similar evidence connected to Neanderthals is sparse and often contested in scientific debates. Each new discovery is thus crucial for our understanding of Neanderthals' cognitive capacity. Here we report on the discovery of an at least 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, northern Germany. The find comes from an apparent Middle Palaeolithic context that is linked to Neanderthals. The engraved bone demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in Neanderthals. Therefore, Neanderthal's awareness of symbolic meaning is very likely. Our findings show that Neanderthals were capable of creating symbolic expressions before H. sapiens arrived in Central Europe.

Humans and animals make inferences about their world every day with limited cognitive resources, limited time, and limited knowledge.  But economists and other social scientists advocating “rational choice” or “enlightened self interest” have followed the trend in twentieth-century analytic philosophy in conceptualizing rational inference based on models that assume boundless knowledge, unlimited processing power, and an eternity with which to make decisions.  Traditionally this has meant that the norms used to justify beliefs, solve problems, make decisions were based on probability theory and logic – with deviations from these norms seen as irrational, biased, or mistaken.  However, this view is problematized by psychological findings regarding judgment, heuristics, and uncertainty as well as philosophers who advocate “naturalizing” epistemology.  Initial findings – notably by Tversky and Kahneman  - in the “heuristics-and-biases” program supported a view that human reasoning is fundamentally flawed and irrational, but later studies by Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues from the perspective of complex adaptive systems in evolutionary context yielded some surprising and counter-intuitive results.  It is these results that strongly suggest the need for a fundamental re-thinking of the evaluative standards used by epistemologists concerned with human reasoning.  This paper will first review some of the more significant psychological literature that challenges the preeminence of logic and probability, then discuss ways, as W. V. Quine, Alvin Goldman and F. John Clendinnen among others already have, that the normative and evaluative project that epistemologists have traditionally engaged can benefit from the descriptive projects of cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.

There is a fundamental difference between robots that are equipped with sensory, motor and cognitive capabilities, vs. simulations or non-embodied cognitive systems. Via their perceptual and motor capabilities, these robotic systems can interact with humans in an increasingly more “natural” way, physically interacting with shared objects in cooperative action settings. Indeed, such cognitive robotic systems provide a unique opportunity to developmental psychologists for implementing their theories and testing their hypotheses on systems that are becoming increasingly “at home” in the sensory--motor and social worlds, where such hypotheses are relevant. The current research is the result of interaction between research in computational neuroscience and robotics on the one hand, and developmental psychology on the other. One of the key findings in the developmental psychology context is that with respect to other primates, humans appear to have a unique ability and motivation to share goals and intentions with others. This ability is expressed in cooperative behavior very early in life, and appears to be the basis for subsequent development of social cognition. Here we attempt to identify a set of core functional elements of cooperative behavior and the corresponding shared intentional representations. We then begin to specify how these capabilities can be implemented in a robotic system, the Cooperator, and tested in human–robot interaction experiments. Based on the results of these experiments we discuss the mutual benefit for both fields of the interaction between robotics and developmental psychology.

If you are an aficionado of cognitive archaeology, you are likely to know what is in the book. The credo is familiar. Modern cognition is best understood in terms of Baddeley's hierarchical model of Enhanced Working Memory (EWM). There were two major leaps in the evolution of ...

This paper proposes a relatively recent advent of the brain disorders such as schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar illness, in anatomically modern humans. We will systematically demonstrate that the phylogenetically newest areas of the brain, including those containing von Economo neurons, are also the areas that are involved in these illnesses as well as other neurodegenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. The evolutionary preservation of these disorders is imputed to conditions similar to those that gave rise to the recent neotenization of Homo sapiens; which is attributed to breeding mate selection becoming influenced by cultural constructs. We consider some recent failed models of biological natural selection and conclude that as hominin evolution became increasingly moderated by non-Darwinian criteria (i.e. niche construction and developmental systems theory possibly overriding the effects of natural selection) towards the end of the Pleistocene, disadvantageous features were tolerated, both of a somatic and neurological nature. Since anthropologists are concerned with human behavior, they should care deeply about the future directions of Homo sapiens sapiens’ evolution, which is proceeding adversely with respect to the prevalence of serious brain illnesses.

"Few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas as the evolution of cooperation. As a result, several mechanisms have been identified to work as catalyzers of cooperative behavior. Yet, these studies, mostly grounded on evolutionary dynamics and game theory, have neglected the important role played by intention recognition in behavioral evolution. Here we address explicitly this issue, characterizing the dynamics emerging from a population of intention recognizers. We derive a Bayesian Network model for intention recognition in the context of repeated social dilemmas and evolutionary game theory, by assessing the internal dynamics of trust between intention recognizers and their opponents. Intention recognizers are then able to predict the next move of their opponents based on past direct interactions, which, in turn, enables them to prevail over the most famous strategies of repeated dilemmas of cooperation,
even in presence of noise. Overall, our framework offers new insights on the complexity and beauty of behavioral evolution driven by elementary forms of cognition."

From the Preface:


The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.