Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biological and Physical Anthropology
Gene-culture coevolution: A broader evolutionary perspective
Published: 2024-09-06
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Gene-culture coevolution (GCC) stands out among approaches to human evolution for its ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences. Combining insights from cultural evolution and human genetics, it has been invoked to explain the evolution of many "species-defining" human traits, from language to large-scale cooperation. However, despite its broad conceptual appeal, empirical evidence [...]
Why did the human brain size evolve? A way forward
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution
Why the human brain size evolved has been a major evolutionary puzzle since Darwin but addressing it has been challenging. A key reason is the lack of research tools to infer the causes of a unique event for which experiments are not possible. We describe how the analogous problem of why there is day and night has been successfully addressed in physics and learning from that experience, we [...]
A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship
Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]
The gene’s-eye view of culture
Published: 2023-11-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
The controversial origins of war and peace: apes, foragers, and human evolution
Published: 2023-03-28
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Other Anthropology, Other Psychology
The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our evolutionary ancestors were peaceful or warlike has important implications for modern human nature. One side argues that warfare has a deep evolutionary history, possible dating to the last common ancestor of bonobos, [...]
Foraging Efficiency and the Importance of Knowledge in Pemba, Tanzania: Implications for Childhood Evolution.
Published: 2022-09-13
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Childhood is a period of life unique to humans. Childhood may have evolved through the need to acquire knowledge and subsistence skills. In an attempt to evaluate the importance of learning for the evolution of childhood, previous research examined the increase with age of returns to foraging across various resources. Any increase could be due to increases in knowledge or other factors such as [...]
The Evolution of Peace
Published: 2022-06-03
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
While some species have affiliative and even cooperative interactions between individuals of different social groups, humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups. Our capacity to have harmonious relationships that cross group boundaries is an important aspect of our species’ success, allowing for the exchange of ideas, materials, [...]
The Shadow of the Neolithic Revolution on Life Expectancy: A Double-Edged Sword
Published: 2022-03-02
Subjects: Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment, Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities, Diseases, Economic History, Economics, Endocrine System Diseases, Growth and Development, Health Economics, Immune System Diseases, Labor Economics, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Economics, Public Health, Regional Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered a process of adaptation reducing mortality from infectious diseases while increasing the propensity for [...]
Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community
Published: 2022-02-28
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Biological and Physical Anthropology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Other Arts and Humanities, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures, Pacific Islands Languages and Societies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Remodelling is a fundamental biological process involved in the maintenance of bone physiology and function. We know that a range of health and lifestyle factors can impact this process in living and past societies, but there is a notable gap in bone remodelling data for populations from the Pacific Islands. We conducted the first examination of femoral cortical histology in 69 individuals from [...]
The Invention of Fistfighting
Published: 2021-10-21
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
It has been hypothesized that key aspects of human male upper limb and facial morphology evolved through selective pressures related to fistfighting. Based on the primatological, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence, I argue these proposals are misguided. An important trend during recent hominin evolution was a decline in upper body strength and facial robusticity, coinciding in part with [...]
Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins
Published: 2021-06-19
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Bacteriology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Phenomena, Cell Phenomena, and Immunity, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetic Phenomena, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Life Sciences, Medical Biochemistry, Medical Cell Biology, Medical Genetics, Medical Immunology, Medical Microbiology, Medical Molecular Biology, Medical Pathology, Medical Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Pharmacology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Virology
On May 16, 2020, the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny organized the symposium “Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins”. The symposium aimed to gather experts on infectious diseases in one place and discuss the interrelationship between different pathogens and humans in an evolutionary context. The talks discussed topics including SARS-CoV-2, dengue and [...]
Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies
Published: 2021-05-18
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial [...]
Implementing network approaches to understand the socioecology of human-wildlife interactions
Published: 2021-05-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human population expansion into wildlife habitats has increased interest in the behavioral ecology of human-wildlife interactions. To date, however, the socio-ecological factors that determine whether, when or where wild animals take risks by interacting with humans and anthropogenic factors still remains unclear. We adopt a comparative approach to address this gap, using social network analysis [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-14
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Various studies have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying culture in humans and other great apes. However, the adaptive reasons for the evolution of uniquely sophisticated cumulative culture in our species remain unclear. We propose that the cultural capabilities of humans are the evolutionary result of a stepwise transition from the ape-like lifestyle of earlier hominins to the foraging [...]