Palaeoanthropology: Sharpening the mind

No Country for Oldowan Men: Emerging Factors in Language Evolution

Language evolution has long been researched. I will review a number of broad, emerging research directions which arguably have the potential to contribute to our understanding of language evolution. Emerging topics in genomics and neurolinguistics are explored, and human-specific levels of braincase globularity - and the broader process of self-domestication within which globularity seems capable of being encapsulated - will be argued to be the central pillars of any satisfactory and interdisciplinary model of language evolution.

Culture and art: Importance of art practice, not aesthetics, to early human culture

Art is expressed in multiple formats in today's human cultures. Physical traces of stone tools and other archaeological landmarks suggest early nonart cultural behavior and symbolic cognition in the early Homo sapiens (HS) who emerged ~300,000-200,000 years ago in Africa. Fundamental to art expression is the neural underpinning for symbolic cognition, and material art is considered its prime example. However, prior to producing material art, HS could have exploited symbolically through art-rooted biological neural pathways for social purpose, namely, those controlling interpersonal motoric coordination and sound codependence. Aesthetics would not have been the primary purpose; arguments for group dance and rhythmical musical sounds are offered here. In addition, triggers for symbolic body painting are discussed. These cultural art formats could well have preceded material art and would have enhanced unity, inclusiveness, and cooperative behavior, contributing significantly to already existing nonart cultural practices.

The effect of trauma on Neanderthal culture: A mathematical analysis

Traumatic lesions are often observed in ancient skeletal remains. Since ancient medical technology was immature, severely traumatized individuals may have frequently lost the physical ability for cultural skills that demand complex body movements. I develop a mathematical model to analyze the effect of trauma on cultural transmission and apply it to Neanderthal culture using Neanderthal fossil data. I estimate from the data that the proportion of adult individuals who suffered traumatic injuries before death was approximately 0.79-0.94, in which 0.37-0.52 were injured severely and 0.13-0.19 were injured before adulthood. Assuming that every severely traumatized individual and a quarter to a half of the other traumatized individuals lost the capacity for a cultural skill that demands complex control of the traumatized body part, I estimate that if an upper limb is associated with a cultural skill, each individual had to communicate closely with at least 1.5-2.6 individuals during adulthood to maintain the skill in Neanderthal society, and if a whole body is associated, at least 3.1-11.5 individuals were necessary. If cultural transmissions between experts and novices were inaccurate, or if low frequency skills easily disappeared from the population due to random drift, more communicable individuals were necessary. Since the community size of Neanderthals was very small, their high risk of injury may have inhibited the spread of technically difficult cultural skills in their society. It may be important to take this inhibition into consideration when we study Neanderthal culture and the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans.

The peopling of the African continent and the diaspora into the new world

Africa is the birthplace of anatomically modern humans, and is the geographic origin of human migration across the globe within the last 100,000 years. The history of African populations has consisted of a number of demographic events that have influenced patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation across the continent. With the increasing amount of genomic data and corresponding developments in computational methods, researchers are able to explore long-standing evolutionary questions, expanding our understanding of human history within and outside of Africa. This review will summarize some of the recent findings regarding African demographic history, including the African Diaspora, and will briefly explore their implications for disease susceptibility in populations of African descent.

Neandertal demise: an archaeological analysis of the modern human superiority complex

Neandertals are the best-studied of all extinct hominins, with a rich fossil record sampling hundreds of individuals, roughly dating from between 350,000 and 40,000 years ago. Their distinct fossil remains have been retrieved from Portugal in the west to the Altai area in central Asia in the east and from below the waters of the North Sea in the north to a series of caves in Israel in the south. Having thrived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years, Neandertals vanished from the record around 40,000 years ago, when modern humans entered Europe. Modern humans are usually seen as superior in a wide range of domains, including weaponry and subsistence strategies, which would have led to the demise of Neandertals. This systematic review of the archaeological records of Neandertals and their modern human contemporaries finds no support for such interpretations, as the Neandertal archaeological record is not different enough to explain the demise in terms of inferiority in archaeologically visible domains. Instead, current genetic data suggest that complex processes of interbreeding and assimilation may have been responsible for the disappearance of the specific Neandertal morphology from the fossil record.