Evolutionary Anthropology 

About: Evolutionary Anthropology is an academic journal published by Wiley. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Paleoanthropology. It has an ISSN identifier of 1060-1538. Over the lifetime, 1021 publications have been published receiving 50300 citations.

The social brain hypothesis

Abstract: Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world. Most attention has therefore been focused on such features as pattern recognition, color vision, and speech perception. By extension, it was assumed that brains evolved to deal with essentially ecological problem-solving tasks. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity

Abstract: Human life histories as compared to those of other primates and mammals have at least four distinctive characteristics: an exceptionally long life span an extended period of juvenile dependence support of reproduction by older post-reproductive individuals and male support of reproduction through the provisioning of females and their offspring. Another distinctive feature of our species is a large brain with its associated psychological attributes: increased capacities for learning cognition and insight. In this paper the authors propose a theory that unites and organizes these observations and generates many theoretical and empirical predictions. The authors present some tests of those predictions and outline new predictions that can be tested in future research by comparative biologists archaeologists paleontologists biological anthropologists demographers geneticists and cultural anthropologists. (authors)

The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

Abstract: Humans are unique in their range of environments and in the nature and diversity of their behavioral adaptations. While a variety of local genetic adaptations exist within our species, it seems certain that the same basic genetic endowment produces arctic foraging, tropical horticulture, and desert pastoralism, a constellation that represents a greater range of subsistence behavior than the rest of the Primate Order combined. The behavioral adaptations that explain the immense success of our species are cultural in the sense that they are transmitted among individuals by social learning and have accumulated over generations. Understanding how and when such culturally evolved adaptations arise requires understanding of both the evolution of the psychological mechanisms that underlie human social learning and the evolutionary (population) dynamics of cultural systems.

Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution

Abstract: Although few hunter-gatherers or foragers exist today, they are well documented in the ethnographic record. Anthropologists have been eager to study them since they assumed foragers represented a lifestyle that existed everywhere before 10,000 years ago and characterized our ancestors into some ill-defined but remote past. In the past few decades, that assumption has been challenged on several grounds. Ethnographically described foragers may be a biased sample that only continued to exist because they occupied marginal habitats less coveted by agricultural people.3 In addition, many foragers have been greatly influenced by their association with more powerful agricultural societies.4 It has even been suggested that Holocene foragers represent a new niche that appeared only with the climatic changes and faunal depletion at the end of the last major glaciation.5 Despite these issues, the ethnographic record of foragers provides the only direct observations of human behavior in the absence of agriculture, and as such is invaluable for testing hypotheses about human behavioral evolution.6.

The 10kTrees Website: A New Online Resource for Primate Phylogeny

Abstract: The comparative method plays a central role in efforts to uncover the adaptive basis for primate behaviors, morphological traits, and cognitive abilities1–4 The comparative method has been used, for example, to infer that living in a larger group selects for a larger neocortex,5, 6 that primate territoriality favors a longer day range relative to home range size,7 and that sperm competition can account for the evolution of primate testes size8, 9 Comparison is fundamental for reconstructing behavioral traits in the fossil record, for example, in studies of locomotion and diet10–13 Recent advances in comparative methods require phylogenetic information,2, 14–16 but our knowledge of phylogenetic information is imperfect In the face of uncertainty about evolutionary relationships, which phylogeny should one use? Here we provide a new resource for comparative studies of primates that enables users to run comparative analyses on multiple primate phylogenies Importantly, the 10,000 trees that we provide are not random, but instead use recent systematic methods to create a plausible set of topologies that reflect our certainty about some nodes on the tree and uncertainty about other nodes, given the dataset The trees also reflect uncertainty about branch lengths