Cultural continuity and its implications on human evolution: A study from eastern Indian

Evidence of human evolution in India is mainly limited to cultural remains. Despite lack of proper absolute chronology a developmental pattern is established. Present work focuses on a specific region in the state of Orissa, located on eastern plateau region. So far no human fossil remain has been found from this area but there is enough cultural evidence to postulate evolutionary sequence. The earliest cultural remain, rich in Acheulian tradition, is found from the lower gravel bed, dated c. 0.3 myr B.P. on the basis of Toba ash. Then onward cultural evidences are found constantly from subsequent beds. Size diminution and refinement of technology is the hallmark for progress. Celts and polishing grinding technology is generally considered as the final phase of Stone Age technology. Findings from the region indicate continuation of the Stone Age tradition for a long time even into the recent past. The earliest metal finding is brass. This alloy is not only persisting in the region but even the technology of making brass objects is the same today. The tribal communities, the indigenous people living in the area, bear a legacy of behavioural strategy for survival. It appears that in the areas, life continued without a break from prehistory to present day in a processual manner. A similar situation is found in Africa, where as a result of comprehensive work the process of continuity is properly understood. In India, lack of absolute dates is the major hindrance for this kind of work. An attempt is made here to understand the behaviour, ecology and other related factors responsible for cultural continuity in the studied area.     

On the evolution of ‘Indian Bison type’ strains of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis

Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP), the causative agent of Johne's disease (JD) in animals, has also been linked with Crohn's disease in human beings. Lack of indigenous diagnostics and vaccine hampered control of JD in India. Designing effective control strategies require thorough understanding of the etiological agent at phenotypic and molecular levels. On the basis of cultural phenotypes and IS1311 PCR-REA typing, MAP strains have been genotyped as ‘Cattle type’, ‘Sheep type’ and ‘Bison type’. Information exists on genetic differences and comparative evolution of ‘Cattle type’ and ‘Sheep type’ strains after divergence from M. avium; however, emphasis has been little on ‘Bison type’ strains. Recently, a new ‘Indian Bison type’ genotype has been reported as principal strain infecting different animal species and human beings in India. The study analyzed few genetic markers to have inferences on the molecular evolution of native MAP isolates belonging to ‘Bison type’ genotype. Results pointed towards recent evolution of ‘Bison type’ genotype.     

Cladistic analyses of behavioural variation in wild Pan troglodytes: exploring the chimpanzee culture hypothesis

Long-term field studies have revealed considerable behavioural differences among groups of wild Pan troglodytes. Here, we report three sets of cladistic analyses that were designed to shed light on issues relating to this interpopulation variation that are of particular relevance to palaeoanthropology.In the first set of analyses, we focused on the proximate cause of the variation. Some researchers have argued that it is cultural, while others have suggested that it is the result of genetic differences. Because the eastern and western subspecies of P. troglodytes are well differentiated genetically while groups within the subspecies are not, we reasoned that if the genetic hypothesis is correct, the phylogenetic signal should be stronger when data from the eastern and western subspecies are analysed together compared to when data from only the eastern subspecies are analysed. Using randomisation procedures, we found that the phylogenetic signal was substantially stronger with in a single subspecies rather than with two. The results of the first sets of analyses, therefore, were inconsistent with the predictions of the genetic hypothesis.The other two sets of analyses built on the results of the first and assumed that the intergroup behavioural variation is cultural in nature. Recent work has shown that, contrary to what anthropologists and archaeologists have long believed, vertical intergroup transmission is often more important than horizontal intergroup transmission in human cultural evolution. In the second set of analyses, we sought to determine how important vertical transmission has been in the evolution of chimpanzee cultural diversity. The first analysis we carried out indicated that the intergroup similarities and differences in behaviour are consistent with the divergence of the western and eastern subspecies, which is what would be expected if vertical intergroup transmission has been the dominant process. In the second analysis, we found that the chimpanzee cultural data are not only comparable to a series of modern human cultural data sets in terms of how tree-like they are, but are also comparable to a series of genetic, anatomical, and behavioural data sets that can be assumed to have been produced by a branching process. Again, this is what would be expected if vertical inter-group transmission has been the dominant process in chimpanzee cultural evolution.Human culture has long been considered to be adaptive, but recent studies have suggested that this needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. With this in mind, in the third set of analyses we investigated whether chimpanzee culture is adaptive. We found the hypothesis that chimpanzee culture is adaptive was supported by an analysis of data from the Eastern African subspecies, but not by an analysis of data from the eastern and western subspecies.The results of our analyses have implications for the number of subspecies in Pan troglodytes, the relationship between hominin taxa and Palaeolithic industries, and the evolution of hominin cognition and behaviour.     

The ripples of "The Big (agricultural) Bang": the spread of early wheat cultivation.

Demographic expansion and (or) migrations leave their mark in the pattern of DNA polymorphisms of the respective populations. Likewise, the spread of cultural phenomena can be traced by dating archaeological finds and reconstructing their direction and pace. A similar course of events is likely to have taken place following the "Big Bang" of the agricultural spread in the Neolithic Near East from its core area in southeastern Turkey. Thus far, no attempts have been made to track the movement of the founder genetic stocks of the first crop plants from their core area based on the genetic structure of living plants. In this minireview, we re-interpret recent wheat DNA polymorphism data to detect the genetic ripples left by the early wave of advance of Neolithic wheat farming from its core area. This methodology may help to suggest a model charting the spread of the first farming phase prior to the emergence of truly domesticated wheat types (and other such crops), thereby increasing our resolution power in studying this revolutionary period of human cultural, demographic, and social evolution.     

Branching,blending, and the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations

It has been claimed that blending processes such as trade and exchange have always been more important in the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations than the branching process of population fissioning. In this paper, we report the results of a novel comparative study designed to shed light on this claim. We fitted the bifurcating tree model that biologists use to represent the relationships of species to 21 biological data sets that have been used to reconstruct the relationships of species and/or higher level taxa and to 21 cultural data sets. We then compared the average fit between the biological data sets and the model with the average fit between the cultural data sets and the model. Given that the biological data sets can be confidently assumed to have been structured by speciation, which is a branching process, our assumption was that, if cultural evolution is dominated by blending processes, the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the cultural data sets should be significantly worse than the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the biological data sets. Conversely, if cultural evolution is dominated by branching processes, the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the cultural data sets should be no worse than the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the biological data sets. We found that the average fit between the cultural data sets and the bifurcating tree model was not significantly different from the fit between the biological data sets and the bifurcating tree model. This indicates that the cultural data sets are not less tree-like than are the biological data sets. As such, our analysis does not support the suggestion that blending processes have always been more important than branching processes in cultural evolution. We conclude from this that, rather than deciding how cultural evolution has proceeded a priori, researchers need to ascertain which model or combination of models is relevant in a particular case and why.     

Grist and mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning

Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).     

The evolutionary language game: an orthogonal approach

Evolutionary game dynamics have been proposed as a mathematical framework for the cultural evolution of language and more specifically the evolution of vocabulary. This article discusses a model that is mutually exclusive in its underlying principals with some previously suggested models. The model describes how individuals in a population culturally acquire a vocabulary by actively participating in the acquisition process instead of passively observing and communicate through peer-to-peer interactions instead of vertical parent-offspring relations. Concretely, a notion of social/cultural learning called the naming game is first abstracted using learning theory. This abstraction defines the required cultural transmission mechanism for an evolutionary process. Second, the derived transmission system is expressed in terms of the well-known selection-mutation model defined in the context of evolutionary dynamics. In this way, the analogy between social learning and evolution at the level of meaning-word associations is made explicit. Although only horizontal and oblique transmission structures will be considered, extensions to vertical structures over different genetic generations can easily be incorporated. We provide a number of simplified experiments to clarify our reasoning.     

Phylogenetic beta diversity metrics, trait evolution and inferring the functional beta diversity of communities

The beta diversity of communities along gradients has fascinated ecologists for decades. Traditionally such studies have focused on the species composition of communities, but researchers are becoming increasingly interested in analyzing the phylogenetic composition in the hope of achieving mechanistic insights into community structure. To date many metrics of phylogenetic beta diversity have been published, but few empirical studies have been published. Further inferences made from such phylogenetic studies critically rely on the pattern of trait evolution. The present work provides a study of the phylogenetic dissimilarity of 96 tree communities in India. The work compares and contrasts eight metrics of phylogenetic dissimilarity, considers the role of phylogenetic signal in trait data and shows that environmental distance rather than spatial distance is the best correlate of phylogenetic dissimilarity in the study system.     

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory,Findings and Controversies

The last two decades have seen an explosion in research analysing cultural change as a Darwinian evolutionary process. Here I provide an overview of the theory of cultural evolution, including its intellectual history, major theoretical tenets and methods, key findings, and prominent criticisms and controversies. ‘Culture’ is defined as socially transmitted information. Cultural evolution is the theory that this socially transmitted information evolves in the manner laid out by Darwin in The Origin of Species, i.e. it comprises a system of variation, differential fitness and inheritance. Cultural evolution is not, however, neo-Darwinian, in that many of the details of genetic evolution may not apply, such as particulate inheritance and random mutation. Following a brief history of this idea, I review theoretical and empirical studies of cultural microevolution, which entails both selection-like processes wherein some cultural variants are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than others, plus transformative processes that alter cultural information during transmission. I also review how phylogenetic methods have been used to reconstruct cultural macroevolution, including the evolution of languages, technology and social organisation. Finally, I discuss recent controversies and debates, including the extent to which culture is proximate or ultimate, the relative role of selective and transformative processes in cultural evolution, the basis of cumulative cultural evolution, the evolution of large-scale human cooperation, and whether social learning is learned or innate. I conclude by highlighting the value of using evolutionary methods to study culture for both the social and biological sciences.     

Comparaison de l'expression de certains caractères crâniens sur les hominidés chinois du Pléistocène récent et de l'Holocène (grotte supérieure de Zhoukoudian, sites de Longxian et de Yanqing)

The human remains recovered from “Grotte supérieure de Zhoukoudian” are the best-preserved Late Pleistocene human fossils in East Asia. For decades, as the representative of the Late Pleistocene human in East Asia, the Upper Cave skulls have been playing important role in the research of origins of modern Mongoloids and American Indians. With the advance of the origin and evolution of modern humans, more attention has been paid to the details and the mechanisms for the late Pleistocene human evolution and the formation of modern human populations. Both the origin and diversification of modern humans have been stressed. Some studies further trigger the debaters on the Upper Cave Man concerning its evolutionary level and its role in the formation of modern human populations in East Asia. To further explore these problems, we examined and compared 12 non-metric features on the 3 Late Pleistocene Upper Cave skulls and 162 Holocene individuals earthed from two archaeological sites of North China (Longxian and Yanqing). Our results indicate that 8 on the 12 features have different expression patterns between Upper Cave Man and recent Chinese leading the authors to believe that more primitive expressions appeared on the Upper Cave Man than on recent Chinese populations. Based on these findings, some problems on the intragroup variation in Late Pleistocene and Holocene populations are discussed.     

中国古代人骨体质人类学的研究进展与展望

近10年来,中国古代人骨遗存的体质人类学研究迅猛发展,研究内容的广度和深度已完全超越了上世纪以人种类型分析为主的情况。这些研究涉及到古代人群的演化、古代疾病与健康、文化习俗相关的骨骼异常、骨骼功能适应、古人口学等多个领域,并积累了一批重要的古代人群体质人类学数据。这些研究工作丰富了我们对东亚地区全新世人群演化历史的认识,体现了多学科的研究理念和研究方法的创新。本文对我国近10年来全新世古代人骨材料的体质人类学研究进展进行了回顾和展望。     

Aquatic biodiversity under anthropogenic stress: an insight from the Archipelago Sea (SW Finland)

The Archipelago Sea in the northern Baltic has been subjected to large-scale cultural, economic and ecological changes, especially during the last three decades. Environmental threats originate from both basin-wide sources, affecting the whole Baltic Sea, and from local sources, such as nutrient loading from nearby river outflows, intense agriculture, fish farming, ships' traffic, boating, and man's physical impacts on the landscape and seascape. Both the Åland archipelago and the Archipelago Sea have been listed as hot-spots by HELCOM, Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, eutrophication being the main threat to the aquatic environment. In this study we review how biological communities have reacted to an increase in man-induced multisource stresses. Changes in plankton, benthic animals, macroalgal assemblages and fish communities have been documented in most parts of the Baltic Sea since the 1970s. What remains to be understood is the importance of these structural changes for the functioning of the Archipelago Sea ecosystem under various levels of human impact.     

Culture evolves

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, here brought together to illustrate the scope of a burgeoning field of cultural evolution and to facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilization. Each approach emphasizes important linkages between culture and evolutionary biology rather than quarantining one from the other. Recent studies reveal that processes important in cultural transmission are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, with important implications for evolutionary theory. Recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments suggest previously unidentified continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like processes are identified, in part, through scientific methods borrowed from biology. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission.     

Models of cultural niche construction with selection and assortative mating

Niche construction is a process through which organisms modify their environment and, as a result, alter the selection pressures on themselves and other species. In cultural niche construction, one or more cultural traits can influence the evolution of other cultural or biological traits by affecting the social environment in which the latter traits may evolve. Cultural niche construction may include either gene-culture or culture-culture interactions. Here we develop a model of this process and suggest some applications of this model. We examine the interactions between cultural transmission, selection, and assorting, paying particular attention to the complexities that arise when selection and assorting are both present, in which case stable polymorphisms of all cultural phenotypes are possible. We compare our model to a recent model for the joint evolution of religion and fertility and discuss other potential applications of cultural niche construction theory, including the evolution and maintenance of large-scale human conflict and the relationship between sex ratio bias and marriage customs. The evolutionary framework we introduce begins to address complexities that arise in the quantitative analysis of multiple interacting cultural traits.     

Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling 'Darwinian' and 'Spencerian' evolutionary approaches in anthropology

Traditional investigations of the evolution of human social and political institutions trace their ancestry back to nineteenth century social scientists such as Herbert Spencer, and have concentrated on the increase in socio-political complexity over time. More recent studies of cultural evolution have been explicitly informed by Darwinian evolutionary theory and focus on the transmission of cultural traits between individuals. These two approaches to investigating cultural change are often seen as incompatible. However, we argue that many of the defining features and assumptions of 'Spencerian' cultural evolutionary theory represent testable hypotheses that can and should be tackled within a broader 'Darwinian' framework. In this paper we apply phylogenetic comparative techniques to data from Austronesian-speaking societies of Island South-East Asia and the Pacific to test hypotheses about the mode and tempo of human socio-political evolution. We find support for three ideas often associated with Spencerian cultural evolutionary theory: (i) political organization has evolved through a regular sequence of forms, (ii) increases in hierarchical political complexity have been more common than decreases, and (iii) political organization has co-evolved with the wider presence of hereditary social stratification.     

Review. The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can address general questions regarding the 'who, what, when and how' of human cultural transmission, and consequently inform a theory of human cultural evolution. Three methods are discussed. The transmission chain method, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, has been used to identify content biases in cultural transmission. These concern the kind of information that is transmitted. Several such candidate content biases have now emerged from the experimental literature. The replacement method, in which participants in groups are gradually replaced or moved across groups, has been used to study phenomena such as cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection and cultural innovation. The closed-group method, in which participants learn in groups with no replacement, has been used to explore issues such as who people choose to learn from and when they learn culturally as opposed to individually. A number of the studies reviewed here have received relatively little attention within their own disciplines, but we suggest that these, and future experimental studies of cultural transmission that build on them, can play an important role in a broader science of cultural evolution.     

New thinking: the evolution of human cognition

Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene-culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.     

Evolution of man in the light of molecular genetics: a review. Part II. Regulation of gene function, evolution of speech and of brains

In the first part of this review the evolutionary history and genomics of the human species were considered in the light of molecular genetic evidence. In this second part the emphasis will be put on the regulation of the function of the genes and evolution of the human-specific traits such as enormously large brains and the capacity to communicate with a spoken language. The age-old question of what specifically makes us humans is also dealt with in its new lightning of molecular genetics of the genome era. It is concluded that, in addition to the structural differences of the genomes, it is most likely that it is different pattern of the regulation of the function of the genes, which evolved for most part through positive natural and sexual selection where the growth and the structure of the human population played a significant role, that differentiates us from our closest living relatives. In this process of the evolution of the most human-specific characteristics, like the size of brains, specifically that or the neocortex, and ability to speak, interbreeding with other forms of the Homo-genus may have played a role. In addition to the role of positive selection in general in the evolution of different human-specific traits, it is evident that this progressive selection has been quite effective, thus leading to accelerated evolution of these traits. Finally it can also be concluded that genetic and cultural evolution have gone hand in hand during the recent, and still continuing, evolution of the mankind interacting with each others in a bidirectional fashion.     

The Hybrid Origin of “Modern” Humans

Recent genomic research has shown that hybridization between substantially diverged lineages is the rule, not the exception, in human evolution. However, the importance of hybridization in shaping the genotype and phenotype of Homo sapiens remains debated. Here we argue that current evidence for hybridization in human evolution suggests not only that it was important, but that it was an essential creative force in the emergence of our variable, adaptable species. We then extend this argument to a reappraisal of the archaeological record, proposing that the exchange of cultural information between divergent groups may have facilitated the emergence of cultural innovation. We discuss the implications of this Divergence and Hybridization Model for considering the taxonomy of our lineage.