Stout Dietrich, Hecht Erin E
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322;
Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7861-7868. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620738114. Epub 2017 Jul 24.
Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a puzzle and a problem. It is puzzling as to why more species have not adopted this manifestly beneficial strategy and problematic because the comparative methods of evolutionary biology are ill suited to explain unique events. Here, we develop a more particularistic and mechanistic evolutionary neuroscience approach to cumulative culture, taking into account experimental, developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence. This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.
文化渗透于人类生活的方方面面。它塑造了我们的思想和身体，并提供了知识、技能、制度和人工制品的累积传承，使我们能够真正站在巨人的肩膀上。没有其他物种能达到人类文化的广度、多样性和复杂性，但我们仍然不确定这是如何形成的。人类文化的独特性既是一个谜题，也是一个问题。令人费解的是，为什么没有更多物种采用这种明显有益的策略，而成为问题的是，进化生物学的比较方法不太适合解释独特事件。在这里，我们针对累积文化开发了一种更具特殊性和机械性的进化神经科学方法，同时考虑到实验、发育、比较和考古证据。这种方法调和了目前关于人类文化起源的相互竞争的观点，并发展了一种独特的人类技术生态位的概念，该概念植根于灵长类动物共有的视觉运动协调和灵巧操作的传统。
