Human Evolution Research Articles

Domestication as the evolution of interspecies cooperative breeding.

We propose that domestication is the result of interspecies cooperative breeding. Considering domestication as an outcome of cooperative breeding can explain how domestication occurs in both plants and animals, encompass cases of domestication that do not involve humans, and shed light on why humans are involved in so many domesticatory relationships. We review the cooperative breeding model of human evolution, which posits that care of human infants by alloparents enabled the evolution of costly human brains and long juvenile development, while selecting for tolerance of strangers. We then explore how human cooperation in the protection and provisioning of young plants and animals can explain the evolution of domestication traits such as changes in development; loss of aggressive, defensive, and bet-hedging aspects of the phenotype; and increased fertility. We argue that the importance of cooperative breeding to human societies has made humans especially likely to enter into interspecies cooperative breeding relationships.

Climate and Human Evolution: Insights from Marine Records.

The relationship between climate and human evolution is complex, and the causal mechanisms remain unknown. Here, we review and synthesize what is currently known about climate forcings on African landscapes, focusing mainly on the last 4 million years. We use information derived from marine sediment archives and data-numerical climate model comparisons and integration. There exists a heterogeneity in pan-African hydroclimate changes, forced by a combination of orbitally paced, low-latitude fluctuations in insolation; polar ice volume changes; tropical sea surface temperature gradients; the Walker circulation; and possibly greenhouse gases. Pan-African vegetation changes do not follow the same pattern, which is suggestive of additional influences, such as CO2 and temperature. We caution against reliance on temporal correlations between global or regional climate, environmental changes, and human evolution and briefly proffer some ideas on how pan-African climate trends could help create novel conceptual frameworks to determine the causal mechanisms of associations between climate/habitat change and hominin evolution.

DSB profiles in human spermatozoa highlight the role of TMEJ in the male germline.

The male mammalian germline is characterized by substantial chromatin remodeling associated with the transition from histones to protamines during spermatogenesis, followed by the reversal to nucleohistones in the male pronucleus preceding the zygotic genome activation. Both transitions are associated with the extensive formation of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), requiring an estimated 5 to 10 million transient DSBs per spermatozoa. Additionally, the high transcription rate in early stages of spermatogenesis leads to transcription-coupled damage preceding meiotic homologous recombination, potentially further contributing to the DSB landscape in mature spermatozoa. Once meiosis is completed, spermatozoa remain haploid and therefore cannot rely on error-free homologous recombination, but instead depend on error-prone classical non-homologous end joining (cNHEJ). This DNA damage/repair-scenario is proposed to be one of the main causes of the observed paternal mutation propensity in human evolution. Recent studies have shown that DSBs in the male pronucleus are repaired by maternally provided Polθ in Caenorhabditis elegans through Polθ-mediated end joining (TMEJ). Additionally, population genetic datasets have revealed a preponderance of TMEJ signatures associated with human variation. Since these signatures are the result of the combined effect of TMEJ and DSB formation in spermatozoa and male pronuclei, we used a BLISS-based protocol to analyze recurrent DSBs in mature human sperm heads as a proxy of the male pronucleus before zygotic chromatin remodeling. The DSBs were found to be enriched in (YR)n short tandem repeats and in evolutionarily young SINEs, reminiscent to patterns observed in murine spermatids, indicating evolutionary hotspots of recurrent DSB formation in mammalian spermatozoa. Additionally, we detected a similar DSB pattern in diploid human IMR90 cells when cNHEJ was selectively inhibited, indicating the significant impact of absent cNHEJ on the sperm DSB landscape. Strikingly, regions associated with most retained histones, and therefore less condensed chromatin, were not strongly enriched with recurrent DSBs. In contrast, the fraction of retained H3K27me3 in the mature spermatozoa displayed a strong association with recurrent DSBs. DSBs in H3K27me3 are associated with a preference for TMEJ over cNHEJ during repair. We hypothesize that the retained H3K27me3 may trigger transgenerational DNA repair by priming maternal Polθ to these regions.

From Motor Augmentation to Body Enhancement, the Harmony between Human Body and Artificial Parts

Based on the recent study of the Third Thumb at the University of Cambridge, one profound question is arising: Do human beings and the human body need a Third Thumb? This article introduces briefly motor augmentation and human augmentation emerging in decades compared to human enhancement, then focuses on three concerns deriving from the methodology of engineering system design including the relationship of system and part, main function and auxiliary function, and engineering system evolution and human evolution, so as to discuss the coordination between the human body and artificial parts generated by wearable interactive technology employed in motor augmentation.

Drilling in an African Lake to Find Out Whether Climate Change Drove Human Evolution

Why does drilling into a dried-out lake in eastern Africa get scientists excited? Simple answer: the lake’s sediments store valuable information about how past climate change shaped the environment where our earliest ancestors lived. Those sediments serve as a natural record of Earth’s ancient climate. While much is known about human evolution from fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the role that climate change might have played for human biological and cultural evolution remained unclear for a long time. But now we have drilled 278 m into the ground at the bottom of the old Chew Bahir Lake in southern Ethiopia, which has given us some detailed answers. This natural record covers the last 620,000 years of climate history from one of the proven habitats of ancient Homo sapiens, and it can help us to unravel connections between climate and human evolution.

Hominin musical sound production: palaeoecological contexts and self domestication

In this article we seek to integrate theories of music origins and dance with hominin fossil anatomy and the paleoecological contexts of hominin evolution. Based on the association between rhythm in music, dance and locomotion, we propose that early bipedal hominins may have evolved neurobiological substrates different from other great apes due to the rhythmic aspects of bipedal walking and running. Combined with the emancipation of the hands resulting from erect posture, we propose that the neurobiological changes necessary for technological innovation, cultural practices and human musical abilities may have evolved, at least in incipient form, much earlier than previously thought. The consequent ability to synchronize movement and sound production may have also proved beneficial as early bipedal hominins ventured out of late Miocene and early Pliocene woodland and forested habitats and into more open habitats with increased predation risk. We also postulate that, along with bipedalism, paedomorphic morphogenesis of the skull at the base of the hominin clade was a necessary prerequisite for the evolution of vocal modulation and singing in later varieties of hominin. To date research into the evolution of music and dance has yet to be integrated with the fossil and paleoecological evidence of early hominin evolution. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna in the extant literature on human evolution. We also suggest that autocatalytic feedback loops evolving synergistically with hominin erect posture, skull and hand morphology, neurochemical processes and the self-domestication syndrome, have been operative from early hominins some 6 Ma to the present. We document this process by reference to primatological, ethnographic, neurochemical and archaeological data.

Dart and the Taung juvenile: making sense of a century-old record of hominin evolution in Africa.

The announcement in 1925 by Raymond Dart of the discovery of the Taung juvenile's skull in a quarry in sub-Saharan Africa is deservedly a classic publication in the history of palaeoanthropology. Dart's paper-which designated Taung as the type specimen of the early hominin species Australopithecus africanus-provided the first fossil evidence supporting Charles Darwin's 1871 prediction that Africa was where the human lineage originated. The Taung juvenile's combination of ape and human characteristics eventually led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of human evolution. This contribution focuses on the milieu in which Dart's paper appeared (i.e. what was understood in 1925 about human evolution), the fossil evidence as set out by Dart, his interpretation of how a species represented by a fossilized juvenile's skull fitted within prevailing narratives about human evolution and the significance of the fossil being found in an environment inferred to be very different from that occupied by living apes. We also briefly review subsequent fossil finds that have corroborated the argument Dart made for having discovered evidence of a hitherto unknown close relative of humans, and summarize our current understanding of the earliest stages of human evolution and its environmental context.

Indirect neurogenesis in space and time.

During central nervous system (CNS) development, neural progenitor cells (NPCs) generate neurons and glia in two different ways. In direct neurogenesis, daughter cells differentiate directly into neurons or glia, whereas in indirect neurogenesis, neurons or glia are generated after one or more daughter cell divisions. Intriguingly, indirect neurogenesis is not stochastically deployed and plays instructive roles during CNS development: increased generation of cells from specific lineages; increased generation of early or late-born cell types within a lineage; and increased cell diversification. Increased indirect neurogenesis might contribute to the anterior CNS expansion evident throughout the Bilateria and help tomodify brain-region size without requiring increased NPC numbers or extended neurogenesis. Increased indirect neurogenesis could be an evolutionary driver of the gyrencephalic (that is, folded) cortex that emerged during mammalian evolution and might even have increased during hominid evolution. Thus, selection of indirect versus direct neurogenesis provides a powerful developmental and evolutionary instrument that drives not only the evolution of CNS complexity but also brain expansion and modulation of brain-region size, and thereby the evolution of increasingly advanced cognitive abilities. This Review describes indirect neurogenesis in several model species and humans, and highlights some of the molecular genetic mechanisms that control this important process.

Human Accelerated Regions regulate gene networks implicated in apical-to-basal neural progenitor fate transitions.

The evolution of the human cerebral cortex involved modifications in the composition and proliferative potential of the neural stem cell (NSC) niche during brain development. Human Accelerated Regions (HARs) exhibit a significant excess of human-specific sequence changes and have been implicated in human brain evolution. Multiple studies support that HARs include neurodevelopmental enhancers with novel activities in humans, but their biological functions in NSCs have not been empirically assessed at scale. Here we conducted a direct-capture Perturb-seq screen repressing 180 neurodevelopmentally active HARs in human iPSC-derived NSCs with single-cell transcriptional readout. After profiling >188,000 NSCs, we identified a set of HAR perturbations with convergent transcriptional effects on gene networks involved in NSC apicobasal polarity, a cellular process whose precise regulation is critical to the developmental emergence of basal radial glia (bRG), a progenitor population that is expanded in humans. Across multiple HAR perturbations, we found convergent dysregulation of specific apicobasal polarity and adherens junction regulators, including PARD3, ABI2, SETD2 , and PCM1 . We found that the repression of one candidate from the screen, HAR181, as well as its target gene CADM1 , disrupted apical PARD3 localization and NSC rosette formation. Our findings reveal interconnected roles for HARs in NSC biology and cortical development and link specific HARs to processes implicated in human cortical expansion.

Ethical Dilemmas of Using Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is considered the fourth industrial revolution that will change the evolution of humanity technically and relationally. Although the term has been around since 1956, it has only recently become apparent that AI can revolutionize technologies and has many applications in the medical field. The ethical dilemmas posed by the use of AI in medicine revolve around issues related to informed consent, respect for confidentiality, protection of personal data, and last but not least the accuracy of the information it uses. A literature search was conducted through PubMed, MEDLINE, Plus, Scopus, and Web of Science (2015-2022) using combinations of keywords, including: AI, future in medicine, and machine learning plus ethical dilemma. The ethical analysis of the issues raised by AI used in medicine must mainly address nonmaleficence and beneficence, both in correlation with patient safety risks, ability versus inability to detect correct information from inadequate or even incorrect information. The development of AI tools that can support medical practice can increase people's access to medical information, to obtain a second opinion, for example, but it is also a source of concern among health care professionals and especially bioethicists about how confidentiality is maintained and how to maintain cybersecurity. Another major risk may be related to the dehumanization of the medical act, given that, at least for now, empathy and compassion are accessible only to human beings. AI has not yet managed to overcome certain limits, lacking moral subjectivity, empathy, the level of critical thinking is still insufficient, but no matter who will practice preventive or curative medicine in the next period, they will not be able to ignore AI, which under human control can be an important tool in medical practice.

Рождение апокалиптического смысла из духа коммуникации: предпосылки формирования эсхатологического сознания в спиритуалистическом движении

Two ideas haunt the eschatological consciousness of modernity: antifinalism, signifying the infinity of spiritual evolution of man and the cosmos; anthropological agency, postulating the important role of man in the development of the eschatological process. The article focuses on the modern spiritualist movement, whose participants anticipated the imminent beginning of a new stage of human evolution. The study suggests that the genesis of the eschatological consciousness of the movement’s participants was conditioned by the specifics of their communication with the spiritual world. Firstly, the condition for the genesis of eschatological consciousness was the loss of a significant person and the psychological experience of nostalgia. Thus, the eschatological verificationism of spiritualists is defined as the projection of their traumatic experience onto the world around them. Secondly, automatic writing practice played a crucial role in the emergence of eschatological consciousness, it determined the spiritualists’ treatment of the medium as a special anthropological type. Thirdly, the features of the séance that may have shaped eschatological consciousness are revealed, while the movement itself is categorized as a millenial cult. The spiritualist interpretation of spiritual communication as an act of transcending “earthly” language into the realm of the “language of thought” is eschatological, because it affirms un unambiguous vision of reality, which is unmediated by any “natural” symbolic system. The borderline situation of eschatological expectation was the key reason for the formation of eschatological consciousness.

Linguistic diversity, pathogen protection, and COVID-19 disparity

Social distancing is a concept adapted on modern society’s understanding of infectious diseases, but there may be an additional mechanism restricting the transmission of airborne pathogens in early human evolution. Linguistic diversity may be an ancient mechanism of social distancing and could explain, at least partially, the variability of COVID-19 infection rates among the different ethnic groups within the same region. A shared common language could break the traditional barrier of linguistic diversity and promote pandemics. This hypothesis suggests that human linguistic behavior could have a significant impact on group’s immunity and survival. Linguistic distance should be considered in pandemic research and control. Future study is warranted to investigate the spread of infectious diseases through shared language and the advantage of linguistic diversity in the prevention of infectious diseases.

An Enumerative and analytical Study of the Sustainable Energy in an Economic Perspectives

In this paper we are focused to study related to sustainable energy’s economic impact on human centric activities. The human evolution is not possible without use of energy. Also, we know that Access and availability of Clean Energy for all till 2030.has recognized in an agenda point of the Sustainable Development Goals. We are focused to study enumerative study of energy consumption with using of the relevant annual reports, authentic information published by the various government and responsible organizations. For analytical study we are used the Analytical indicators such as AAGR, CAGR, and Percentage Distributions to interpret the relevant tables.

Evolution of micro and SME's innovating senior management supply chains

Post-pandemic technology guides individuals to evolve strategic thinking by creating logistics solutions. The digital paradigm of MSMEs must innovate by linking administrative thinking with technology. Objectivity analyzes impacts on management 4.0 in supply chains, driving the individual to disrupt the logistics environment.The methodology is qualitative, descriptive. Using statistical samples. The design of the instrument consists of questionnaires that represent the main basis of impacts as an object of study, describing and analyzing survey results. The results represent 52% of MSMEs that sell online in Mexico and 48% sell through other channels, in addition productivity losses are explored with the impact of COVID-19. It is concluded that business evolution 4.0 generates adaptability to human evolution in the design of new visions of creating supply chains with a digital focus in the state of Mexico, resulting in an increase in operations by electronic commerce.Human evolution and its adaptation to a technological cognitive level is decisive to positively impact challenges in industry 4.0 and create strategies to balance occupational human wear to improve the quality of work and productive life in business entities.

Human-specific paralogs of SRGAP2 induce neotenic features of microglia structural and functional maturation.

Microglia play key roles in shaping synaptic connectivity during neural circuits development. Whether microglia display human-specific features of structural and functional maturation is currently unknown. We show that the ancestral gene SRGAP2A and its human-specific (HS) paralogs SRGAP2B/C are not only expressed in cortical neurons but are the only HS gene duplications expressed in human microglia. Here, using combination of xenotransplantation of human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived microglia and mouse genetic models, we demonstrate that (1) HS SRGAP2B/C are necessary and sufficient to induce neotenic features of microglia structural and functional maturation in a cell-autonomous manner, and (2) induction of SRGAP2-dependent neotenic features of microglia maturation non-cell autonomously impacts synaptic development in cortical pyramidal neurons. Our results reveal that, during human brain evolution, human-specific genes SRGAP2B/C coordinated the emergence of neotenic features of synaptic development by acting as genetic modifiers of both neurons and microglia.

Самоформирование через деятельность и отбор в эволюционной траектории человеческого вида

The author attempts to answer the following key question, namely: does selection exist in biosocial evolution and what is the role of human activity in it? Accordingly, we consider the biosocial evolution of the human species as the object of research, and we consider such aspects of this evolution in its pre-historic stage as activity and selection as the subject of research. We think that the relevance of the topic of the article lies in the application of the methods of biological evolutionary science to social evolution. We have in mind the following methodological tools: the idea of artificial selection; the concept of a human niche; the idea of selection against aggression; the idea of self-domes-tication, understood as a special transitional evolutionary process, which then transforms into macrohistory proper. In this article we discuss four approaches to the presence of certain forms of selection in human biosocial evolution, namely: (1) the Darwinian position and its later extended variants in the form of a genetic version of natural selection; (2) concepts linking human modification of the animal traits with the creation of an anthropogenic niche and cultural construction; (3) the view of those who attribute human domestication to selection against aggression; (4) theories of social selection, in which already successful practices or more cohesive groups are selected for.

Language awareness: On the semiotics of talk and text

The article argues for a necessity to increase human awareness of language as functional biological behavior rather than simply a tool in the service of communication, by emphasizing the difference between talk and text as ontologically different semiotic phenomena characteristic of the human cognitive domain. The established tradition to view written words as linguistic signs leads the studies of natural language astray, effectively hiding its nature as biologically functional orientational behavior in a consensual domain that evolved with the evolution of our species and was not a cultural invention. Because of the identification of text with talk in linguistic semiotics, the empirical validity of the core semiotic concept of natural linguistic sign, based on the so-called semiotic triangle, is undermined. While talk is a dynamic fact of nature, text is a static artifact; it is argued, therefore, that the analytical approach to linguistic signs as objects in the world is inadequate, and the notions of first- and second-order semiotics are introduced. It is concluded that awareness of the cognitive-semiotic difference between talk and text and their respective roles in the evolution of humans may facilitate further research into the nature and origin of humanness.

Why Is the Frequency of a Risk More Important than Its Severity in Retaining Adaptive Information? A Multilevel Analysis of Human Evolution Using Snakes as Models

Why Is the Frequency of a Risk More Important than Its Severity in Retaining Adaptive Information? A Multilevel Analysis of Human Evolution Using Snakes as Models

Atlas for the Lateralized Visuospatial Attention Networks (ALANs): Insights from fMRI and network analyses

Abstract Hemispheric specialization is central to human evolution and fundamental to human cognitive abilities. While being a defining feature of functional brain architecture, hemispheric specialization is overlooked to derive brain parcellations. Alongside language, which is typically lateralized in the left hemisphere, visuospatial attention is set to be its counterpart in the opposite hemisphere. However, it remains uncertain to what extent the anatomical and functional underpinnings of lateralized visuospatial attention mirror those supporting language. Building on our previous work, which established a lateralized brain atlas for language, we propose a comprehensive cerebral lateralized atlas delineating the anatomo-functional bases of visuospatial attention, Atlas for Lateralized visuospatial Attentional Networks (ALANs). Combining task and resting-state functional connectivity analyses, we identified 95 lateralized brain areas comprising three networks supporting visual (visu), motor (somato-motor), and spatial processing (posterior-medial) processes at work during a line judgment bisection task, and two large-scale networks related to integrated visuospatial attention processes, the parieto-frontal and temporo-frontal networks. We identify hubs playing a pivotal role in the intra-hemispheric interaction within visuospatial attentional networks. The rightward lateralized parieto-frontal encompasses one hub, the inferior frontal sulcus, while the temporo-frontal network encompasses two right hubs: the inferior frontal cortex (pars triangularis and the anterior insula) and the posterior part of the superior temporal sulcus. Compared with our language lateralized atlas, we demonstrated that specific regions within these networks encompass the homotope of the language network from the left hemisphere. This atlas of visuospatial attention provides valuable insights for future investigations into the variability of visuospatial attention and hemispheric specialization research. Additionally, it facilitates more effective comparisons among different studies, thereby enhancing the robustness and reliability of research in the field of attention.

Modelling the evolution of human postmenopausal longevity using ordinary differential equations

We present two simple ODE systems based on the mathematical model in Le et al. (2022) investigating how human postmenopausal longevity could have evolved. Specifically, our ODE systems address a fairly recent and provocative hypothesis that ancestral males choosing younger mates drove the evolution of menopause (Morton et al., 2013). We analyse one system in two ways: (1) determining the explicit solution and (2) reducing it to one ODE and drawing a bifurcation diagram. We analyse the other system by reducing it to two ODEs and using a phase plane. The concepts in this article are suitable for a late second-year or third-year course in nonlinear ODEs. Our models demonstrate that undergraduate students of dynamical systems can critically engage with a highly cited and internationally recognised hypothesis of human evolution.