Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California-Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Jul 20;375(1803):20190498. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0498. Epub 2020 Jun 1.
Humans evolved from an ape ancestor that was highly intelligent, moderately social and moderately dependent on cultural adaptations for subsistence technology (tools). By the late Pleistocene, humans had become highly dependent on culture for subsistence and for rules to organize a complex social life. Adaptation by cultural traditions transformed our life history, leading to an extended juvenile period to learn subsistence and social skills, post-reproductive survival to help conserve and transmit skills, a dependence on social support for mothers of large-brained, very dependent and nutrient-demanding offspring, males devoting substantial effort to provisioning rather than mating, and the cultivation of large social networks to tap pools in information unavailable to less social species. One measure of the success of the exploitation of culture is that the minimum inter-birth interval of humans is nearly half that of our ape relatives. Another measure is the wide geographical distribution of humans compared with other apes, based on subsistence systems adapted to fine-scale spatial environmental variation. An important macro-evolutionary question is why our big-brained, culture-intensive life-history strategy evolved so recently and in only our lineage. We suggest that increasing spatial and temporal variation in the Pleistocene favoured cultural adaptations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.
人类从一个高度智慧、中等社会性和中等依赖文化适应生存技术（工具）的猿类祖先进化而来。到更新世晚期，人类已经高度依赖文化来维持生存，并依赖规则来组织复杂的社会生活。文化传统的适应改变了我们的生活史，导致延长了学习生存和社交技能的青少年期，延长了有生育能力的后期来帮助保存和传递技能，依赖社会支持来养育大脑大、依赖性强、营养需求高的后代的母亲，男性投入大量精力来供养，而不是交配，以及培养大型社交网络来利用其他社交物种无法获得的信息池。衡量文化开发成功的一个标准是，人类的最小生育间隔几乎是我们猿类近亲的一半。另一个衡量标准是与其他猿类相比，人类在地理上的广泛分布，这是基于适应精细空间环境变化的生存系统。一个重要的宏观进化问题是，为什么我们这种大脑大、文化密集的生活史策略在最近才出现，而且只出现在我们这一支系中。我们认为，更新世时空变化的增加有利于文化适应。本文是主题为“生活史和学习：儿童期、照顾和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的一部分。
