Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708; email:
Annu Rev Psychol. 2017 Jan 3;68:155-186. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044201. Epub 2016 Oct 12.
The challenge of studying human cognitive evolution is identifying unique features of our intelligence while explaining the processes by which they arose. Comparisons with nonhuman apes point to our early-emerging cooperative-communicative abilities as crucial to the evolution of all forms of human cultural cognition, including language. The human self-domestication hypothesis proposes that these early-emerging social skills evolved when natural selection favored increased in-group prosociality over aggression in late human evolution. As a by-product of this selection, humans are predicted to show traits of the domestication syndrome observed in other domestic animals. In reviewing comparative, developmental, neurobiological, and paleoanthropological research, compelling evidence emerges for the predicted relationship between unique human mentalizing abilities, tolerance, and the domestication syndrome in humans. This synthesis includes a review of the first a priori test of the self-domestication hypothesis as well as predictions for future tests.
研究人类认知进化的挑战在于，既要确定我们智力的独特特征，又要解释它们是如何产生的。与非人类猿类的比较表明，我们早期出现的合作交流能力对人类所有形式的文化认知的进化至关重要，包括语言。人类自我驯化假说提出，当自然选择有利于晚期人类进化中群体内的亲社会性而不是攻击性时，这些早期出现的社交技能就进化了。作为这种选择的副产品，人类被预测会表现出其他家养动物中观察到的驯化综合征的特征。在回顾比较、发展、神经生物学和古人类学研究时，有力的证据表明了独特的人类心理能力、宽容和人类驯化综合征之间的预测关系。这一综合包括对自我驯化假说的第一个先验测试的回顾，以及对未来测试的预测。
