The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation

Michael Tomasello,Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera

doi:10.1007/s12110-017-9291-1

Abstract

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014, in Human Nature 25(1):28–48), following Hrdy (Mothers and Others, Harvard University Press, 2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and attention from adults in a cooperative breeding context. Here we attempt to reconcile these two accounts. Our composite account accepts Hrdy’s and Hawkes’s contention that the extremely early emergence of human infants’ cooperative skills suggests an important role for cooperative breeding as adaptive context, perhaps in early Homo. But our account also insists that human cooperation goes well beyond these nascent skills to include such things as the communicative and cultural conventions, norms, and institutions created by later Homo and early modern humans to deal with adult problems of social coordination. As part of this account we hypothesize how each of the main stages of human ontogeny (infancy, childhood, adolescence) was transformed during evolution both by infants’ cooperative skills “migrating up” in age and by adults’ cooperative skills “migrating down” in age.

Highlights

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis
The result of all of these considerations is that the interdependence hypothesis has a weakness in that it has no ready explanation for the early ontogenetic emergence of skills of shared intentionality, and the cooperative breeding hypothesis has a weakness in that it has no ready explanation for how humans go beyond joint attention and gestural communication to the complex cognition underlying human cultural life
We focus here on Tomasello et al.’s (2012) first step in the evolution of uniquely human cooperation, a period during which early humans began cooperating in new ways but did not yet have cultural organization. (Later we speculate briefly about the ontogeny of modern humans, Homo sapiens, after the emergence of culture.) The proposal is that these new ways of cooperating involved both collaborative foraging and cooperative breeding, which would have been complementary components in an overall more cooperative lifestyle

Summary

Introduction

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The foundational skills, which emerge in human infancy and early childhood, concern such things as joint attention (the intersubjective sharing of experience) and cooperative communication via gestures such as pointing and, language.

Results

Conclusion