Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Jul 20;375(1803):20190493. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0493. Epub 2020 Jun 1.
Humans possess some unique social-cognitive skills and motivations, involving such things as joint attention, cooperative communication, dual-level collaboration and cultural learning. These are almost certainly adaptations for humans' especially complex sociocultural lives. The common assumption has been that these unique skills and motivations emerge in human infancy and early childhood as preparations for the challenges of adult life, for example, in collaborative foraging. In the current paper, I propose that the curiously early emergence of these skills in infancy--well before they are needed in adulthood--along with other pieces of evidence (such as almost exclusive use with adults not peers) suggests that aspects of the evolution of these skills represent ontogenetic adaptations to the unique socio-ecological challenges human infants face in the context of a regime of cooperative breeding and childcare. 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'.
人类拥有一些独特的社会认知技能和动机，涉及到共同注意力、合作沟通、双重层次的协作和文化学习等方面。这些几乎可以肯定是人类特别复杂的社会文化生活的适应。人们普遍认为，这些独特的技能和动机在人类婴儿期和幼儿期就出现了，是为了应对成年生活的挑战做准备，例如在合作觅食中。在当前的论文中，我提出，这些技能在婴儿期就非常早地出现了——远早于它们在成年后需要的时间——以及其他一些证据（例如，几乎只与成年人而不是同龄人一起使用）表明，这些技能进化的某些方面代表了对人类婴儿在合作养育和育儿环境中面临的独特社会生态挑战的个体发生适应。本文是主题为“生活史和学习：儿童期、养育和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的一部分。
