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The human life history is adapted to exploit the adaptive advantages of culture
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences Pub Date : 2020-05-31 , DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0498
Peter J Richerson 1 , Robert Boyd 2
Affiliation  

Humans evolved from an ape ancestor that was highly intelligent, moderately social and moderately dependent on cultural adaptations for subsistence technology (tools). By the late Pleistocene, humans had become highly dependent on culture for subsistence and for rules to organize a complex social life. Adaptation by cultural traditions transformed our life history, leading to an extended juvenile period to learn subsistence and social skills, post-reproductive survival to help conserve and transmit skills, a dependence on social support for mothers of large-brained, very dependent and nutrient-demanding offspring, males devoting substantial effort to provisioning rather than mating, and the cultivation of large social networks to tap pools in information unavailable to less social species. One measure of the success of the exploitation of culture is that the minimum inter-birth interval of humans is nearly half that of our ape relatives. Another measure is the wide geographical distribution of humans compared with other apes, based on subsistence systems adapted to fine-scale spatial environmental variation. An important macro-evolutionary question is why our big-brained, culture-intensive life-history strategy evolved so recently and in only our lineage. We suggest that increasing spatial and temporal variation in the Pleistocene favoured cultural adaptations.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.

中文翻译:

人类生活史的适应是为了利用文化的适应性优势

人类是从猿类祖先进化而来的,猿类祖先具有高度智慧、中等社会性和适度依赖文化适应的生存技术(工具)。到更新世晚期,人类已经高度依赖文化来维持生存,并依赖规则来组织复杂的社会生活。文化传统的适应改变了我们的生活史,导致幼年期延长,以学习生存和社交技能,在生殖后生存以帮助保存和传播技能,使大脑大、依赖性强、营养丰富的母亲对社会支持的依赖。雄性对后代要求很高,将大量精力投入到供给而不是交配上,并培育大型社交网络,以获取社会性较低的物种无法获得的信息。衡量文化开发成功与否的一个标准是,人类的最小生育间隔几乎是我们猿类亲戚的一半。另一个衡量标准是,与其他类人猿相比,人类的地理分布范围更广,其基础是适应精细尺度空间环境变化的生存系统。一个重要的宏观进化问题是,为什么我们的大脑大、文化密集的生活史策略进化得这么晚,而且只在我们的血统中进化。我们认为,更新世不断增加的时空变化有利于文化适应。本文是“生命史与学习:童年、照料和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”主题的一部分。
更新日期:2020-05-31
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