CARTA - Anthropogeny (Audio)

All humans have the capacity for aggression and reconciliation. However, it is cultural institutions that harness aggression by shaping cognition, corresponding emotions and defining appropriate responses. In this talk, Polly Wiessner (Univ of Utah) compares the cultural institutions related to aggression and violence and their outcomes in two different societies: Ju/’hoan hunter-gatherers of the...

In this talk, Carol Ember (Yale Univ) describes the results from decades-long research that tested a variety of theories about warfare and other forms of violence in a sample of 186 societies. Many of the theories of warfare assumed to be plausible fell short, such as the idea that war becomes more likely with agriculture and political complexity. On the other hand, resource scarcity, particularly...

Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology on the climatic framework of Neandertal evolution. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29689]

Renowned historian of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University addresses the question of human impacts on climate and whether we will survive the future, and posits that humanity will need to make substantial change in what we do and how we think. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29695]

Why does humor exist at all? It consumes a lot of time and energy, and some humans are arguably addicted to humor. Daniel Dennett (Tufts Univ) explores what, in biological terms, sustains this costly habit. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 24981]

This symposium presents varied perspectives from earth scientists, ecologists, and paleoanthropologists on how climate may have shaped human evolution, as well as the prospects for the future of world climate, ecosystems, and our species. Elizabeth Hadly begins with a discussion about A Tipping Point: Using the Past to Forecast Our Future, followed by Naomi Oreskes on Human Impacts: Will We Surviv...

This symposium presents varied perspectives from earth scientists, ecologists, and paleoanthropologists on how climate may have shaped human evolution, as well as the prospects for the future of world climate, ecosystems, and our species with Jeff Severinghaus on Abrupt Climate Transitions and Humans, followed by William Ruddiman on How Humans Took Control of Climate, and Charles Kennel on The Imp...

Questions and answers and closing remarks for the symposium Human-Climate Interactions and Evolution: Past and Future. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 29697]

Charles Kennel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego addresses the impacts of Arctic sea ice retreat on contemporary climate. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29693]

Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution addresses how climate instability affected the evolution of human adaptability. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29690]

Peter deMenocal of Columbia University on cycles of African climate change and its effect on human evolution. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 29688]

Co-Director of The Center for Advanced Research and Training in Anthropogen, Ajit Varki, welcomes guests and partcipants to this symposium which presents varied perspectives from earth scientists, ecologists, and paleoanthropologists on how climate may have shaped human evolution, as well as the prospects for the future of world climate, ecosystems, and our species. Series: "CARTA - Center for Aca...

This symposium presents varied perspectives from earth scientists, ecologists, and paleoanthropologists on how climate may have shaped human evolution, as well as the prospects for the future of world climate, ecosystems, and our species with Peter deMenocal on African Climate Change and Human Evolution, followed by Jean-Jacques Hublin on The Climatic Framework of Neandertal Evolution, and Rick Po...

In human languages, spoken and signed, words or signs are products of combinatorial systems that combine meaningless smaller units in different ways to yield different words or signs with different meanings. In spoken languages, those smaller units are the sounds of speech (phonemes). In sign languages, they are handshapes, movements, and the places on the body where signs are made. In this talk D...

Merlin Donald (Queen’s Univ) opines that if one crucial adaptation had to be singled out as the signature move that started the human journey, he would nominate “mimesis,” or body artistry, which is the platform on which all complex skilled performance, including language, has evolved. A capacity for refining skill started to evolve very early in the emergence of hominids, as testified by the exis...

CARTA: Behaviorally Modern Humans: The Origin of Us – Michael Hammer: Interbreeding with Archaic Humans in Africa Today there is an abundance of DNA sequence data from the entire genome of contemporary human populations, as well as from ancient DNA recovered from extinct forms of humans. Michael Hammer (Univ of Arizona) discusses how analyses of these data, with increasingly sophisticated computat...

V.S. Ramachandran (UC San Diego) argues that human mental uniqueness emerged from the fortuitous co-emergence of certain novel anatomical structures and functions and equally fortuitous synergistic interactions between them. These include structures involved in inter-sensory abstraction (IPL and its uniquely human subdivisions; supra-marginal gyrus and angular gyrus; certain frontal structures, We...

A key feature of human social interactions is the ability to make inferences about other individuals’ mental states (e.g. others’ knowledge, beliefs and desires). Juliane Kaminski (Univ of Portsmouth, UK) reviews studies which investigate whether the cognitive capacities underlying these skills are uniquely human or shared, at least to some degree, with other species. Series: "CARTA - Center for A...

This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. One source, which is discussed in these three talks, concerns neuroscientific investigations of functional specialization for language in the human brain and its dependence on the linguistic input the language learner gets during cognitive develo...

Roger Levy, Co-Chair of this CARTA symposium on the evolution of Language, introduces the speakers and topics for this symposium which addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29407]

This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. In this program, the speakers field questions from the audience and the seminar is concluded. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 29406]

Edward Chang of UC San Francisco is interested in determining the basic mechanisms that underlie our ability to perceive and produce speech. While much of this processing has been localized to the peri-sylvian cortex, including Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, the fundamental organizational principles of the neural circuits within these areas are completely unknown. To address this, his laboratory ap...

Using data from brain imaging investigations and studies of patients with brain damage, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Evelina Fedorenko argues that a set of brain regions in the adult human brain – in the frontal and temporal lobes of the left hemisphere -- are specialized for high-level language processing. She further argues that this fronto-temporal network develops as we acquire language kn...

Pascal Gagneux, associate director of CARTA, introduces this symposium which addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 29396]

This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. One source, which is discussed in these three talks, concerns what contrasts between new and mature languages reveal about how language evolves. Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook Univ) begins with an examination of the Co-emergence of Meaning and Structu...