Departamento de Psicología y Sociología, Universidad de Zaragoza, Campus Universitario de Teruel, 44003, Teruel, Spain.
Departamento de Zoología y Antropología Física, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Murcia, Campus Universitario de Espinardo Edificio 20, 30100 Murcia, Spain.
Phys Life Rev. 2023 Jul;45:6-24. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2023.02.005. Epub 2023 Mar 6.
A prerequisite for copying innovative behaviour faithfully is the capacity of observers' brains, regarded as 'hierarchically mechanistic minds', to overcome cognitive 'surprisal' (see 2.), by maximising the evidence for their internal models, through active inference. Unlike modern humans, chimpanzees and other great apes show considerable limitations in their ability, or 'Zone of Bounded Surprisal', to overcome cognitive surprisal induced by innovative or unorthodox behaviour that rarely, therefore, is copied precisely or accurately. Most can copy adequately what is within their phenotypically habitual behavioural repertoire, in which technology plays scant part. Widespread intra- and intergenerational social transmission of complex technological innovations is not a hall-mark of great-ape taxa. 3 Ma, precursors of the genus Homo made stone artefacts, and stone-flaking likely was habitual before 2 Ma. After that time, early Homo erectus has left traces of technological innovations, though faithful copying of these and their intra- and intergenerational social transmission were rare before 1 Ma. This likely owed to a cerebral infrastructure of interconnected neuronal systems more limited than ours. Brains were smaller in size than ours, and cerebral neuronal systems ceased to develop when early Homo erectus attained full adult maturity by the mid-teen years, whereas its development continues until our mid-twenties nowadays. Pleistocene Homo underwent remarkable evolutionary adaptation of neurobiological propensities, and cerebral aspects are discussed that, it is proposed here, plausibly, were fundamental for faithful copying, which underpinned social transmission of technologies, cumulative learning, and culture. Here, observers' responses to an innovation are more important for ensuring its transmission than is an innovator's production of it, because, by themselves, the minimal cognitive prerequisites that are needed for encoding and assimilating innovations are insufficient for practical outcomes to accumulate and spread intra- and intergenerationally.
忠实复制创新行为的一个前提是，观察者的大脑作为“分层机械思维”，通过主动推断，最大限度地为内部模型提供证据，从而克服认知“惊讶”（见 2.）。与现代人类不同，黑猩猩和其他类人猿在克服由创新或非正统行为引起的认知惊讶的能力或“有限惊讶区”方面存在相当大的局限性，因此，这些行为很少被准确或精确地复制。大多数情况下，它们只能复制在其表型习惯行为范围内的内容，而技术在其中几乎没有发挥作用。复杂技术创新的广泛的代内和代际社会传播并不是大猿类的标志。300 万年前，人属的祖先制造了石器工具，而石器加工可能在 200 万年前就已经成为习惯。在此之后，早期的直立人留下了技术创新的痕迹，尽管这些创新及其代内和代际的社会传播在 100 万年前之前很少被忠实复制。这可能是由于与我们的相比，连接神经元系统的大脑基础设施更有限。早期的直立人脑容量比我们小，并且当他们在 10 多岁时达到完全成年的成熟度时，其大脑的神经元系统就停止发育，而现在我们的大脑在 20 多岁时仍在发育。更新世的人类经历了神经生物学倾向的显著进化适应，本文讨论了大脑的各个方面，这些方面在这里被提出，很可能是忠实复制的基础，这是技术的社会传播、累积学习和文化的基础。在这里，观察者对创新的反应对于确保其传播比创新者的创新生产更重要，因为创新本身所需要的最小认知前提不足以使创新在代内和代际之间积累和传播。
