Evolutionary Anthropology最新文献

Since the Late Pleistocene, humans and dogs have coevolved in the Arctic, forming a symbiotic relationship essential to survival, mobility, and adaptation. Archeological evidence shows dogs were used as traction animals by the Early Holocene, ultimately facilitating Inuit expansion and shaping Arctic settlement patterns. Despite recent declines in sled dog populations due to colonial factors, climate change, and cultural shifts, dogs remain central to Inuit identity. This paper frames the human-dog cooperation as a dynamic system of mutual learning, or enskilment, where both species acquire shared skills through collaboration. Tools like harnesses and whips serve as communicative devices within this system. Drawing on archeological and contemporary Inuit practices, the study highlights how embodied knowledge and animal agency contribute to ecological resilience. By viewing the Arctic as a co-managed landscape shaped by human-dog cooperation, the paper challenges static views of adaptation and underscores the enduring significance of this interspecies relationship.

Gene-culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal however, empirical evidence is often perceived as limited to a few key examples like lactase persistence. We argue this apparent gap between theoretical appeal and empirical evidence stems from conceptual ambiguities regarding the scope of relevant gene-culture interactions. Drawing on recent work in animal gene-culture coevolution and human genomics, we propose a “broad” approach that formally incorporates drift and migration alongside natural selection. This builds upon and subsumes the existing “narrow” framework focused on selection. Through case studies of skin pigmentation evolution and gift-exchange network influences on genetic variation in Melanesia, we demonstrate how cultural factors shape both adaptive and neutral genetic variation and population structure. This integrative perspective accommodates diverse empirical findings while opening new avenues for research in human evolution.

Although research on human values is abundant, it has so far neglected a crucial question: what are the psychological mechanisms whereby culture shapes people's values? To address this, the manuscript introduces a framework examining how culture shapes the acquisition of values, a process referred to as cultural incentive learning. The proposal is that cultural incentive learning mediates the influence exerted by the structure of society upon people's values. According to the framework, when the social structure changes, certain forms of learning (i.e., conditioned reinforcement) are elicited which promote value change. Simultaneously, other forms of learning, which are based on imitating other people's behavior, pull toward the preservation of previous values, ensuring that value change is not too precipitous and that group cooperation is maintained. Applying these principles to cultural evolution, the paper develops a theory of how values evolve over history, a process we label Value Evolution.

The evolution of the human brain has long been framed in terms of sexual selection, with an emphasis on consistent but small on-average volumetric differences between males and females. In this review, we present new molecular, genetic and clinical findings regarding neurodevelopment, cortical expansion and the production of sex steroid hormones, such as testosterone and oestradiol, by the placenta during pregnancy. We discuss converging evidence that on-average sex differences are relevant for human evolution but are characterised by significant overlap between the sexes and more adaptations in female, rather than male, physiology. We also consider recent accounts and modelling of evolutionary pressures in large social groups, regarding competition and fertility. Finally, we bring these findings together and present a novel hypothesis for understanding human brain development and evolution, which emphasises the role of sex steroid hormones, their prenatal production by the placenta and their roles in regulating physiology, fertility and cognition.

O'Connell, J. F., K. Hawkes, and N. B. Jones, “Targeting the Hunting Hypothesis: Review of Evidence From the Hadza,” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 34 (2025): e70002, http://doi.org/10.1002/evan.70002.

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The hunting hypothesis holds that ancestral human males favored their own mates and children in sharing meat gained from big game hunting, a practice said to have led to the origin of nuclear families and related changes in life history. Data from East African Hadza hunter-gatherers operating in an environment like that prevalent when and where Homo evolved contradict key elements of this idea. An alternative model, the grandmother hypothesis, holds that senior women's foraging and food sharing led to life history changes that favored mate guarding, not paternal provisioning, in the formation of nuclear family-like social units. Relevant data and theory are reviewed and evaluated.