New Twist Added to the Role of Culture in Human Evolution

[Charles Brown]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-twist-added-to-the-role-of-culture-in-human-evolution/

New Twist Added to the Role of Culture in Human Evolution

A radical new take on human evolution adds a large dose of luck to the
usual story emphasizing the importance of our forebears' ability to
make tools
By Ian Tattersall

More In This Article

Once we were not Alone

How We Came To Be Human

Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall Talks about What Makes Humans Special [Video]

We humans are very peculiar primates. We walk upright, precariously
balancing our heavy bodies on two short feet. Our heads are oddly
swollen, with tiny faces and small jaws tucked below the front of our
balloonlike braincases. Perhaps most remarkably, we process
information about the world around us in an entirely unprecedented
way. As far as anyone can tell, we are the only organisms that
mentally deconstruct our surroundings and our internal experiences
into a vocabulary of abstract symbols that we juggle in our minds to
produce new versions of reality: we can envision what might be, as
well as describe what is.

Our predecessors were not so exceptional. The fossil record clearly
shows that not much more than seven million years ago, our ancient
precursor was an apelike, basically tree-dwelling creature that
carried its weight on four limbs and had a large projecting face and
powerful jaws hafted in front of a very modest-sized braincase. In all
probability, it possessed a cognitive style broadly equivalent to that
of a modern chimpanzee. Though undeniably smart, resourceful, and able
to recognize and even combine symbols, modern apes do not seem capable
of rearranging them to forge new realities. Thus, to arrive at our own
species, Homo sapiens, from this ancestor took a lot of fast
evolutionary modification.