Up from the Ape: the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a rich history of explaining evolution through its displays and educational programs. For much of this history, there has been a permanent hall dedicated to human evolution and its related disciplines. Different versions of these halls have informed tens of millions of visitors, and today’s offering is one of the world’s newest, opened in 2007 and named the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. The hall’s design is radical in that it starts by giving molecular genetics and the fossil record equal billing and thus provides the visitor with two independent but highly complementary lines of evidence for our own evolution. Other parts of the hall are innovative in that they stress taxonomic diversity in the fossil record as much as the more traditional chronological “story” of human evolution that is usually found in museum exhibits. The hall is also unique in that it incorporates a fully operational teaching laboratory within its architectural footprint, which provides educators with the chance to seamlessly integrate hands-on lab sessions and the surrounding exhibits as teaching aids.     

Prolegomenon to a history of paleoanthropology: The study of human origins as a scientific enterprise. Part 1. Antiquity to the eighteenth century

Interest in the history of paleoanthropology and the other disciplines related to human origins studies has grown considerably over the last several decades. Some very informative historical surveys have been written by prominent scientists reflecting on the major developments in their fields. Some well‐known early examples include Glyn Daniel's The Idea of Prehistory (1962) and The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (1967), which focus primarily on the history of archaeology, Kenneth Oakley's “The problem of man's antiquity: an historical survey” published in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) [Geology] (1964), and L. S. B. Leakey's Unveiling Man's Origins; Ten Decades of Thought about Human Evolution (1969), with the latter two focusing on the contributions of geology, paleontology, and biology to the problem of human evolution.     

Epigenetics as a Driver of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease: Did We Forget the Fathers?

What are the effects of our environment on human development and the next generation? Numerous studies have provided ample evidence that a healthy environment and lifestyle of the mother is important for her offspring. Biological mechanisms underlying these environmental influences have been proposed to involve alterations in the epigenome. Is there enough evidence to suggest a similar contribution from the part of the father? Animal models provide proof of a transgenerational epigenetic effect through the paternal germ line, but can this be translated to humans? To date, literature on fathers is scarce. Human studies do not always incorporate appropriate tools to evaluate paternal influences or epigenetic effects. In reviewing the literature, I stress the need to explore and recognize paternal contributions to offspring's health within the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis, and coin this new concept the Paternal Origins of Health and Disease paradigm (POHaD). A better understanding of preconceptional origins of disease through the totality of paternal exposures, or the paternal exposome, will provide evidence‐based public health recommendations for future fathers.

     

牙齿残留物反映的闽西新石器时代人类食谱

本项目对福建闽西地区奇和洞与南山两处新石器时代遗址出土古人类牙齿进行了表面残留物提取与鉴定,通过对其中淀粉粒残留物的种类与数量对比,讨论了全新世初期至中期闽西地区古人类对植物资源的利用方式。这些古人类牙齿表面包含四大类形态不同的淀粉粒:1)多面体形;2)圆形或椭圆形;3)圆锥形;4)水滴形。这些淀粉粒分别代表了禾本科植物种子、植物地下根茎部分和疑似的坚果类,这些都是古人类容易获得的野生食物资源,在新石器时代古人类的饮食中占据着重要的地位。     

The adaptive significance of cultural behavior

In this article, I argue that human social behavior is a product of the coevolution of human biology and culture. While critical of attempts by anthropologists to explain cultural practices as if they were independent of the ability of individual human beings to survive and reproduce, I am also leery of attempts by biologists to explain the consistencies between neo-Darwinian theory and cultural behavior as the result of natural selection for that behavior. Instead, I propose that both biological and cultural attributes of human beings result to a large degree from the selective retention of traits that enhance the inclusive fitnesses of individuals in their environments. Aspects of human biology and culture may be adaptive in the same sense despite differences between the mechanisms of selection and regardless of their relative importance in the evolution of a trait. The old idea that organic and cultural evolution are complementary can thus be used to provide new explanations for why people do what they do.This article was prepared from remarks I presented at the Smithsonian Conference on Human Biogeography in April 1974. Help with phenotypic costs came from an NSF Pre-doctoral Fellowship and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.     

The evolution of vocabulary

Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world. The vocabulary of human language is unique in being both culturally transmitted and symbolic. In this paper I present an investigation into the factors involved in the evolution of such vocabulary systems. I investigate both the cultural evolution of vocabulary systems and the biological evolution of learning rules for vocabulary acquisition. Firstly, vocabularies are shown to evolve on a cultural time-scale so as to fit the expectations of learners-a population's vocabulary adapts to the biases of the learners in that population. A learning bias in favour of one-to-one mappings between meanings and words leads to the cultural evolution of communicatively optimal vocabulary systems, even in the absence of any explicit pressure for communication. Furthermore, the pressure to conform to the biases of learners is shown to outweigh natural selection acting on cultural transmission. Human language learners appear to bring a one-to-one bias to the acquisition of vocabulary systems. The functionality of human vocabulary may therefore be a consequence of the biases of human language learners. Secondly, the evolutionary stability of genetically transmitted vocabulary learning biases is investigated using both static and dynamic models. A one-to-one learning bias, which leads to the cultural evolution of optimal communication, is shown to be evolutionarily stable. However, the evolution de novo of this bias is complicated by the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of vocabulary systems. This suggests that the biases of human language learners may not have evolved specifically and exclusively for the acquisition of communicatively functional vocabulary.     

The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins

The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, Richard G. Klein. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 810 pp.     

Comparative cognitive science and the Japanese influence in primatology

Review of Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior by Tetsuro Matsuzawa. Tokyo, Springer‐Verlag, 2001, xxi + 587 pp, 248 fig., 4 in color, $119.00.     

'From the moment of conception...': the Vatican instruction on artificial procreation techniques

An analysis is presented of Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation, the official response of the Catholic Church to moral questions raised by the new reproductive technologies which sets down ethical guidelines for the treatment to be accorded human embryos and for procreative techniques from artificial insemination to surrogate motherhood. The document is viewed in the perspective of earlier Church pronouncements, such as The Declaration on Procured Abortion , and its definition of a person as an individual animated by a rational soul is explored in detail for its implications for discussions on the personhood of the human embryo.     

Imitation and conventional communication

To the extent that language is conventional, non-verbal individuals, including human infants, must participate in conventions in order to learn to use even simple utterances of words. This raises the question of which varieties of learning could make this possible. In this paper I defend Tomasello’s (The cultural origins of human cognition. Harvard UP, Cambridge, 1999, Origins of human communication. MIT, Cambridge, 2008) claim that knowledge of linguistic conventions could be learned through imitation. This is possible because Lewisian accounts of convention have overstated what one must know to participate in conventions; and because the required knowledge could be learned imitatively. The imitation claim that I defend is consistent with what we know about both the proliferation of conventional behaviours in human children, who are skilful imitators, and the comparative absence of such behaviours in non-human great apes, who are poor at imitative learning.     

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Michael Tomasello. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 248 pp.     

Reconstructing Human Origins: A Modern Synthesis

Reconstructing Human Origins:. Modern Synthesis. Glenn C. Conroy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.557 pp.     

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Richard W. Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Boston: Houghton- Mifflin, 1996. 350 pp.     

Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins

Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins. Stephanie Moser. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 200 pp.     

Monogamy,strongly bonded groups,and the evolution of human social structure

Human social evolution has most often been treated in a piecemeal fashion, with studies focusing on the evolution of specific components of human society such as pair‐bonding, cooperative hunting, male provisioning, grandmothering, cooperative breeding, food sharing, male competition, male violence, sexual coercion, territoriality, and between‐group conflicts. Evolutionary models about any one of those components are usually concerned with two categories of questions, one relating to the origins of the component and the other to its impact on the evolution of human cognition and social life. Remarkably few studies have been concerned with the evolution of the entity that integrates all components, the human social system itself. That social system has as its core feature human social structure, which I define here as the common denominator of all human societies in terms of group composition, mating system, residence patterns, and kinship structures. The paucity of information on the evolution of human social structure poses substantial problems because that information is useful, if not essential, to assess both the origins and impact of any particular aspect of human society.     

Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research

Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research. G. A. Clark and C. M. Willermet. eds. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine De Gruyter, 1997.508 pp.     

Origins of the Human Brain

Origins of the Human Brain. J. P. Changeux and J. Chavaillon. eds. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995. 321 pp.     

The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior

The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior. Craig B. Stanford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999. 254 pp.     

A Place Containing Many Places: Museums and the Use of Objects to Represent Place in Melanesia

In this paper I discuss a number of incompatible ways of comprehending object meanings, contrasting western ethnographic museum practice with indigenous, specifically ni-Vanuatu, understandings. I discuss these differences as a way of looking analytically at some of the practices of museum ethnography and material culture studies. There are several aspects to this contrast: here I concentrate on ideas about place. Place is a centrally important concept in Vanuatu, but is not privileged in relation to objects. Western museums, however, use provenance as any ethnographic object's defining characteristic, and have developed a sophisticated, though largely unexamined, set of principles and practices for the attribution of provenance on stylistic grounds. On the basis of provenance identification, museums attribute meaning to objects. When enshrined as professional museum practice, such approaches pose dilemmas for Melanesian museums, and are the subject of debate among Pacific region museum professionals. For ni-Vanuatu, the significance of objects on display may represent not places, but the performance of the skills that reveal the maker's place-based identity.     

Sexual Size Dimorphism,Canine Dimorphism,and Male-Male Competition in Primates

Sexual size dimorphism is generally associated with sexual selection via agonistic male competition in nonhuman primates. These primate models play an important role in understanding the origins and evolution of human behavior. Human size dimorphism is often hypothesized to be associated with high rates of male violence and polygyny. This raises the question of whether human dimorphism and patterns of male violence are inherited from a common ancestor with chimpanzees or are uniquely derived. Here I review patterns of, and causal models for, dimorphism in humans and other primates. While dimorphism in primates is associated with agonistic male mate competition, a variety of factors can affect male and female size, and thereby dimorphism. The causes of human sexual size dimorphism are uncertain, and could involve several non-mutually-exclusive mechanisms, such as mate competition, resource competition, intergroup violence, and female choice. A phylogenetic reconstruction of the evolution of dimorphism, including fossil hominins, indicates that the modern human condition is derived. This suggests that at least some behavioral similarities with Pan associated with dimorphism may have arisen independently, and not directly from a common ancestor.