Abstract
Humans are the only species to have evolved cooperative care-giving as a strategy for disease control. A synthesis of evidence from the fossil record, paleogenomics, human ecology, and disease transmission models, suggests that care-giving for the diseased evolved as part of the unique suite of cognitive and socio-cultural specializations that are attributed to the genus Homo. Here we demonstrate that the evolution of hominin social structure enabled the evolution of care-giving for the diseased. Using agent-based modeling, we simulate the evolution of care-giving in hominin networks derived from a basal primate social system and the three leading hypotheses of ancestral human social organization, each of which would have had to deal with the elevated disease spread associated with care-giving. We show that (1) care-giving is an evolutionarily stable strategy in kin-based cooperatively breeding groups, (2) care-giving can become established in small, low density groups, similar to communities that existed before the increases in community size and density that are associated with the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic, and (3) once established, care-giving became a successful method of disease control across social systems, even as community sizes and densities increased. We conclude that care-giving enabled hominins to suppress disease spread as social complexity, and thus socially-transmitted disease risk, increased.
Highlights
Current research[16] suggests that this package of cognitive traits may have been key to enabling hominins to recognize when other individuals were sick and in need of care
We suggest that disease recognition is a previously unrecognized, and crucial, element of the social and cognitive traits that are associated with increasing social complexity in the genus Homo[3,6,7,18,19,20]
We simulate the evolution of care-giving for the diseased in a basal primate social system, in which the sole care-giving bonds occur between mother and infant, and compare this with feasibility of the evolution of care-giving in the three leading hypotheses of ancestral human social structure: pair-bonded[42,43], pair-bonded with indirect reciprocal altruism from a random individual[44,45,46], and cooperative breeding with assistance from kin[12,14,47,48]
Summary
Current research[16] suggests that this package of cognitive traits may have been key to enabling hominins to recognize when other individuals were sick and in need of care. Processing; changes in someone’s voice can alert the listener to respiratory infections These neural overlaps in disease recognition and social cognition provide compelling evidence that the two evolved together. This work shows that disease recognition must be recognized as cognitively complex independent of social cognition[16]; in addition to integrating multisensory cues from the respective sensory networks, it involves “superadditive” processing[16] This superadditive processing uses cognitive pathways that are not involved when evaluating cues from healthy individuals nor when the visual or the olfactory cues for disease were evaluated individually, providing clear evidence that disease recognition requires complex, multi-level cognitive processing[16]. We show that kin-based cooperative breeding, in contrast to the other social systems, likely facilitated the evolution of care-giving in the human lineage, but once effective care was established, care-giving networks would have become more flexible, potentially contributing to the diversity and flexibility of human social systems
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