The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (35 page)

9
See for example G. R. Hunt, “Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian crows,”
Nature
379 (1996): 249–251.

10
A. Whiten, “The second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans,”
Nature
437 (2005): 52–55.

11
M. Haslam et al., “Primate archaeology,”
Nature
460 (2009): 339–344.

12
This discussion throws a whole new light on the words to that otherwise utterly infuriating song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Henry.”

13
See for example A. H. Taylor et al., “Do New Caledonian crows solve physical problems through causal reasoning?,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
276 (2009): 247–254; A. H. Taylor et al., “Complex cognition and behavioural innovation in New Caledonian crows,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
277 (2010): 2637–2643; A. H. Taylor et al., “Context-dependent tool use in New Caledonian crows,”
Biology Letters
(2011), doi:10.1098/rsbi.2011.0782.

14
The New Caledonian crow, for example, has a large brain relative to its size, even compared with other crow species. See J. Cnotka et al., “Extraordinary
large brains in tool-using New Caledonian crows (
Corvus moneduloides
),”
Neuroscience Letters
433 (2008): 241–245; J. Mehlhorn et al., “Tool-making New Caledonian crows have large associative brain areas,”
Brain, Behaviour and Evolution
75 (2010): 63–70.

15
C. J. Lepre et al., “An earlier origin for the Acheulian,”
Nature
477 (2011): 82–85.

16
G. Sharon, “Acheulian giant-core technology: A worldwide perspective,”
Current Anthropology
50 (2009): 335–367; S. J. Lycett et al., “Acheulean variability and hominin dispersals: A model-bound approach,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
35 (2008): 553–562.

17
T. Wynn, “Handaxe enigmas,”
World Archaeology
27 (1995): 10–24; J. C. Whittaker and G. McCall, “Handaxe-hurling hominids: An unlikely story,”
Current Anthropology
42 (2001): 566–572.

18
S. Mithen, “Handaxes: The first aesthetic artefacts,” in E. Voland and K. Grammer, eds.,
Evolutionary Aesthetics
(Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003), 261–274; A. J. Machin et al., “Why are some handaxes symmetrical? Testing the influence of handaxe morphology on butchery effectiveness,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
34 (2007): 883–893.

19
A. Kohn and S. Mithen, “Handaxes: Products of sexual selection?,”
Antiquity
73 (1999): 518–526. See also the counterargument—A. Nowell and M. L. Chang, “The case against sexual selection as an explanation for handaxe morphology,”
PaleoAnthropology
(2009): 77–88.

20
F. Berna et al., “Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
109 (2012): 7593–7594.

21
A. Brumm et al., “Hominins on Flores, Indonesia, by one million years ago,”
Nature
464 (2010): 748–752.

22
C. Dean et al., “Growth processes in teeth distinguish modern humans from
Homo erectus
and earlier hominins,”
Nature
414 (2001): 628–631; H. Coqueugniot et al., “Early brain growth in
Homo erectus
and implications for cognitive ability,”
Nature
431 (2004): 299–302.

23
P. Mellars, “Neanderthals and the modern human colonization of Europe,”
Nature
432 (2004): 461–465.

24
B. Wood, “Origin and evolution of the genus
Homo
,”
Nature
355 (1992): 783–790; H. M. McHenry and K. Coffing, “
Australopithecus
to
Homo
: Transformations in body and mind,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
29 (2000): 125–146.

25
B. Wood and M. Collard, “The human genus,”
Science
284 (1999): 65–71.

26
B. Asfaw et al., “
Australopithecus garhi
: A new species of early hominid from Ethiopia,”
Science
284 (1999): 629–635; L. Berger et al., “
Australopithecus sediba
: A new species of
Homo
-like australopith from South Africa,”
Science
328 (2010): 195–204.

CHAPTER 9

1
University of Cambridge, Research News,
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-bird-tango-cambridge-academic-fuses-love-of-birds-and-dance/
, accessed 12 April 2012.

2
For example, this clip narrated by David Attenborough, from BBC Worldwide,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0
, accessed 12 April 2012.

3
J. M. Dally et al., “Food-caching western scrub-jays keep track of who was watching when,”
Science
312 (2006): 1662–1665; C. R. Raby et al., “Planning for the future by western scrub-jays,”
Nature
445 (2007): 919–992; N. J. Emery and N. S. Clayton, “Effects of experience and social context on prospective caching strategies by scrub jays,”
Nature
414 (2001): 443–446.

4
N. J. Emery and N. S. Clayton, “Comparing the complex cognition of birds and primates,” in L. J. Rogers and G. Kaplan, eds.,
Comparative Vertebrate Cognition: Are Primates Superior to Non-Primates?
(New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2004), 3–56.

5
N. J. Emery, “Cognitive ornithology: The evolution of avian intelligence,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
361 (2006): 23–43; S. Shultz and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Social bonds in birds are associated with brain size and contingent on the correlated evolution of life-history and increased parental investment,”
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
100 (2010): 111–123; M. J. Burish et al., “Brain architecture and social complexity in modern and ancient birds,”
Brain, Behavior and Evolution
63 (2004): 107–124.

6
H. J. Jerison, “The theory of encephalization,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
299 (1977): 146–160; H. J. Jerison and H. B. Barlow, “Animal intelligence as encephalization,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
308 (1985): 21–35.

7
With the possible exception, I like to think, of the gluteus maximus—the major muscle that forms the mass of the buttocks, essential to our bipedal stance. You may draw whatever conclusion you will from this comparison.

8
G. P. Rightmire, “Brain size and encephalization in early to mid-Pleistocene
Homo
,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
124 (2004): 109–123.

9
C. B. Ruff et al., “Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene
Homo
,”
Nature
387 (1997): 173–176.

10
G. P. Rightmire, “Human evolution in the Middle Pleistocene: The role of
Homo heidelbergensi
s,”
Evolutionary Anthropology
6 (1998): 218–227.

11
H. Thieme, “Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany,”
Nature
385 (1997): 807–810.

12
R. N. Carmody and R. W. Wrangham, “The energetic significance of cooking,”
Journal of Human Evolution
57 (2009): 379–391.

13
L. C. Aiello and P. Wheeler, “The expensive-tissue hypothesis: The brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution,”
Current Anthropology
36 (1995): 199–221.

14
A. Navarrete et al., “Energetics and the evolution of human brain size,”
Nature
480 (2011): 91–93.

15
R. Wrangham,
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
(London: Profile Books, 2009).

16
H. H. Stedman et al., “Myosin gene mutation correlates with anatomical changes in the human lineage,”
Nature
428 (2004): 415–418.

17
D. Lieberman,
The Evolution of the Human Head
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

18
K. Hawkes et al., “Grandmothering, menopause, and the evolution of human life histories,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
95 (1998): 1336–1339.

19
P. S. Kim et al., “Increased longevity evolves from grandmothering,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
279 (2012): 4880–4884.

20
R. Mace and A. Alvergne, “Female reproductive competition within families in rural Gambia,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
279 (2012): 2219–2227.

21
C. Stringer and C. Gamble,
In Search of the Neanderthals: Solving the Puzzle of Human Origins
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

22
In
The Social Conquest of Earth
, Edward O. Wilson stresses the importance of the evolution of advanced social life, achieved in two very different ways, by
Homo sapiens
and by social insects such as ants and termites.

23
C. Spearman, “
‘General intelligence,’ objectively determined and measured,”
American Journal of Psychology
15 (1904): 201–292; J. Duncan et al., “A neural basis for general intelligence,”
Science
289 (2000): 457–460; I. J. Deary et al., “Genetic contributions to stability and change in intelligence from childhood to old age,”
Nature
482 (2012): 212–215.

CHAPTER 10

1
That is, bad luck: one can’t help but think that Hamlet would have had much sympathy with William Bell, who wrote the lyrics of the blues standard “Born under a Bad Sign”: “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

2
I am grateful to Walter Gratzer for alerting me to this, along with many others in a similar vein, such as “Scientists Make Gorillas Pregnant.”

3
M. J. Noad et al., “Cultural revolution in whale songs,”
Nature
408 (2000): 537.

4
M. S. Brainard and A. J. Doupe, “What songbirds teach us about learning,”
Nature
417 (2002): 351–358.

5
Now I am older and past my prime, I can play practically anything, even Whitesnake.

6
As reported by Humphrey Carpenter in
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
(London: HarperCollins, 1977).

7
C. Henshilwood et al., “Emergence of modern human behavior: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa,”
Science
295 (2002): 1278–1280.

CHAPTER 1 1

1
When anyone uses the word “surely” in an argument, it usually means that they’ve had to resort to special pleading.

2
J. M. Dally et al., “Food-caching western scrub-jays keep track of who was watching when,”
Science
312 (2006): 1662–1665.

3
N. J. Emery and N. S. Clayton, “Effects of experience and social context on prospective caching strategies by scrub jays,”
Nature
414 (2001): 443–446.

4
S. Baron-Cohen et al., “Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’?,”
Cognition
21 (1985): 37–46.

5
S. Ramsden et al., “Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain,”
Nature
479 (2011): 113–116; K. Powell, “How does the teenage brain work?,”
Nature
442 (2006): 865–867.

6
In the notorious song by Harry “The Hipster” Gibson. I have a truly marvelous anecdote about this song, but this footnote is too small to contain it. And, in case you were wondering, the perpetrator wasn’t Mr. Murphy. He was just as puzzled by the occurrence of nembutal in his overalls.

7
You can find it in English in Borges’s collection,
Labyrinths
.

8
K. Smith, “Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will,”
Nature
477 (2011): 23–25.

9
See for example the interview with vision researcher Christof Koch in
Science
335 (2012): 1426–1427.

10
N. J. Dominy and P. W. Lucas, “Ecological importance of trichromatic vision to primates,”
Nature
410 (2001): 363–366.

11
N. J. Dingemanse et al., “Behavioural reaction norms: Animal personality meets individual plasticity,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
25 (2010): 81–89; J. Stamps and T. G. G. Groothuis, “The development of animal personality: Relevance, concepts and perspectives,”
Biological Reviews
85 (2010): 301–325.

12
D. Cyranoski, “Pet project,”
Nature
466 (2010): 1036–1038.

13
M. Wolf et al., “Life-history trade-offs favour the evolution of animal personalities,”
Nature
447 (2007): 581–584.

14
The literature on this is enormous. See for example M. Nielsen et al., “A longitudinal investigation of self-other discrimination and the emergence of mirror self-recognition,”
Infant Behavior and Development
26 (2003): 213–226.

15
T. Suddendorf and E. Collier-Baker, “The evolution of visual self-recognition: Evidence of absence in lesser apes,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
276 (2009): 1671–1677; J. M. Plotnick et al., “Self-recognition in an Asian elephant,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA
103 (2006): 17053–17057; D. Reiss and L. Marino, “Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
98 (2001): 5937–5942; H. Prior et al., “Mirror-induced behavior in the magpie (
Pica pica
): Evidence of self-recognition,”
PLOS Biology
6 (2008): e202, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202.

16
See for example J. L. Brown and A. M. Eklund, “Kin recognition and the major histocompatibility complex: An integrative review,”
American Naturalist
143 (1994): 435–461.

AFTERWORD