Category: Evolution

Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution

The Cognition and Culture website has posted a link to the new edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on ‘cultural transmission and evolution of human behaviour.’ I wanted to comment on just one piece on embodied cognition and cultural evolution, by philosophers Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark (unfortunately, Philosophical Transactions B is behind a subscription wall, although there’s a one-page ‘free preview’ [ouch] here). The Cognition and Culture website has the table of contents posted here. I was vaguely familiar with Michael Wheeler’s work before this piece, but Andy Clark (it’s not much of a profile) has written some of the work that’s most influenced my thinking about the effects of varied skill acquisition on cognition, especially his remarkable book, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Amazon listing).

A ream of Clark’s papers can be found here. A review of Michael Wheeler’s book, Reconstructing the cognitive world: The next step, written by Leslie Marsh can be downloaded here. We’ll come back to Andy Clark’s work again in later posts.

I must admit a certain morbid fascination with how one of my favorite streams of thought — embodied cognition — would fare combined with cultural evolution — an area of scholarship that, well, to put it nicely, is uneven (before you get all defensive, let me just stop you with one word: mimetics). It’s sort of like watching one of your good friends get hit on by a sleazy guy at a bar. She looks happy, but you’re sort of cringing at the chance that she might actually take him home. In spite of this instinctual cringe, this special edition of Philosophical Transactions has some really interesting work on cultural evolution, especially because many of the pieces focus tightly on the enormously problematic issue of cultural transmission.

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Cooperative Hunting by Chimpanzees

The following video is the best illustration I have ever seen of how chimpanzees hunt together in coordinated fashion, with different individuals having different roles. It combines both on-the-ground video and overhead infrared to illustrate just how this group of chimpanzees manages a successful hunt of colobus monkeys. Incredible footage!

(If it doesn’t play, try going directly to the You Tube clip.)

Christophe Boesch has spear-headed the research to document hunting roles among chimpanzees. He published on cooperative hunting in a 1994 Animal Behaviour article (pdf) and discussed hunting roles, meat sharing, and learning more specifically in a 2002 Human Nature article (pdf).

Craig Stanford is another researcher who has focused on hunting by chimpanzees. He has written this online essay, The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees, which is an excellent overview of what we know about chimpanzee predatory behavior.

John Mitani has also published on why male chimpanzees hunt and share meat; in 2002 John also provided an overview about recent developments in the study of wild chimpanzee behavior. I posted more video on chimpanzee behavior, including hunting, just this week – so check that out for more footage.

For what chimpanzee hunting means about our own evolution, we have two contrasting views – hunters vs. being hunted. Craig Stanford has a 2001 popular book The Hunting Ape: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior. That book should be tempered by the more recent Man the Hunted: Primates, Predation and Human Evolution.

Chimpanzees: Too Close for Comfort

Back in 1992, David Attenborough narrated the film Too Close for Comfort, a documentary on chimpanzee life and behavior in the Tai Forest. The Tai Forest is a national park in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. The film centers on the work of Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann, who have been working in the Ivory Coast for years. Together the two wrote the book The Chimpanzees of the Tai Forest: Behavioral Ecology and Evolution.

I use this film in my Introduction to Anthropology class, it just has some extraordinary footage. Mike Richards, the cameraman, spent two years on this project! Here is one clip, where the chimps are filmed cooperatively hunting colobus monkeys. Wow.

There are four other clips available:

Closest links to man – the intro to the movie and the Tai chimps

Hard nuts to crack – the chimps cracking nuts with tools

Fall of Brutus – the confrontation between two dominant males that takes place over a bonanza of nuts

Eat them before they eat you – where chimps use tools to eat safari ants and a leaf sponge to drink water

Christophe Boesch has his extensive publications available for download at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. One recent publication is: Is Culture a Golden Barrier between Chimpanzees and Humans? where he argues that chimpanzees display a broad cultural repertoire, similar to humans. He wrote a 2001 piece for Scientific American on The Cultures of Chimpanzees. And if you want to know more about cooperative hunting, here’s a 2002 Human Nature paper on that.

Update: I have posted another spectacular video of chimpanzee hunting, including infrared views of their group tactics from the air as they hunt a pack of colobus monkeys.

Faces of the Human Past

Ian Tattersall, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and Richard Milner, an editor at Natural History, co-authored the 2007 Natural History feature story Faces of the Human Past. But it’s the illustrations by Victor Deak and Gary Sawyer that really stand out.

Sawyer is a physical anthropologist at the American Museum, an expert in recreating muscles and tendons and other anatomical features from past bones; Deak is the artist who makes it all come alive. Just above I have posted my favorite of their recreations, a Paranthropus boisei (some still call that species an Australopithecus boisei). The boisei skulls and teeth are striking in their robust breadth, but I had never seen an illustration that caught my fancy until this one.

Australopithecus afarensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo ergaster are the other species featured in the article, with seven different images in total. There is also a captivating graphic of a “dissection in reverse,” showing how they went about recreating the face of a Homo heidelbergensis. All the illustrations, and more besides, were included in the recent book The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans.

Meet the Family: Human Evolution

Here’s a video I found this week and used in my lecture on human evolution on Thursday. It’s well put together, and provides a good visualization of some major moments/species over the past six million years. A few ideas that are still being debated in the field might get slipped in, and this video represents a “splitter” view (seeing more species in the fossil record than the “lumpers”, including the Neanderthals as separate). But overall I liked it.