Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Apr 12;366(1567):1080-9. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0370.
The abundant evidence that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years, and dispersed across the world only within the past 100,000 years, provides us with a strong framework in which to consider the evolution of human diversity. While there is evidence that the human capacity for culture has a deeper history, going beyond the origin of the hominin clade, the tendency for humans to form cultures as part of being distinct communities and populations changed markedly with the evolution of H. sapiens. In this paper, we investigate 'cultures' as opposed to 'culture', and the question of how and why, compared to biological diversity, human communities and populations are so culturally diverse. We consider the way in which the diversity of human cultures has developed since 100,000 years ago, and how its rate was subject to environmental factors. We argue that the causes of this diversity lie in the distribution of resources and the way in which human communities reproduce over several generations, leading to fissioning of kin groups. We discuss the consequences of boundary formation through culture in their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts.
人类在过去的 20 万年里在非洲进化，并在过去的 10 万年里才扩散到世界各地，这一丰富的证据为我们提供了一个强有力的框架，使我们能够考虑人类多样性的进化。虽然有证据表明人类的文化能力具有更深远的历史，可以追溯到人科的起源之外，但人类作为独特的社区和群体形成文化的倾向，随着智人的进化而发生了显著变化。在本文中，我们研究了“文化”，而不是“文化”，以及与生物多样性相比，人类社区和群体在文化上为何如此多样化，以及原因是什么。我们考虑了自 10 万年前以来人类文化多样性的发展方式，以及其发展速度如何受到环境因素的影响。我们认为，这种多样性的原因在于资源的分布以及人类社区在几代人的时间里繁殖的方式，导致亲属群体的分裂。我们在更广泛的生态和进化背景下讨论了通过文化形成边界的后果。
