CARTA - Anthropogeny (Audio)

Mark Aronoff focuses on the emergence of words and lexical categories in new sign languages in this talk. Using naming experiments with groups of non-signing gesturers and signers of new languages, his research team has shown how all groups consistently distinguish between names and actions. They have also shown that emerging lexical distinctions are both cognitive and communicative in nature. The...

Matt Cartmill (Boston University) explains the connection between human body fat and bipedality. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 23671]

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, has to do with the ways languages get new structure not present in the language of the previous generation(s) of speakers or signers. Simon Kirby (Univ of Edinburgh) begins with an examination...

In this talk Ray Jackendoff explores forms of language with very limited organization. Such languages largely lack the familiar manifestations of syntactic structure, but they still manage to map between sound and meaning. Examples include early stages of child language, stages in acquisition of second languages by adults, pidgins, “home sign” (the sign systems invented by deaf children with no si...

In this talk Ann Senghas traces the development of basic sentence structure and vocabulary in Nicaraguan Sign Language, in order to uncover the effect of language acquisition processes on language emergence and convergence across age cohorts. Evolutionary principles must apply not only to the development of humans as language learners, but also to the development of languages as systems that chang...

Contact languages represent some of the ways that new languages can be created, as they systematically combine elements from more than one existing language, resulting in novel linguistic systems. When multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, elements are likely to be reanalyzed, and new structural categories may be created that differ from those in the source languages. In...

By realizing that cultural as well as biological evolution has a central role to play in the origins of language, Simon Kirby and his team have unlocked a method that allows them to observe the evolutionary emergence of language structure in miniature cultures that they have created in the lab. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show...

Conjugal families are often assumed to be building blocks of human societies and the primary site of childrearing in traditional communities. Alternatively, Kristen Hawkes (Univ of Utah) contends that the Grandmother Hypothesis draws attention to other relationships likely fundamental in the evolution of our lineage. Persistent ties that crosscut conjugal families are implied by our cooperative ch...

James Noonan, Assistant Professor of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine, focuses on identifying changes in gene regulation during early embryonic development that contributed to the evolution of uniquely human biological traits. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 21988]

Apart from references to the oldest fossil hominins attributed to Homo sapiens, the East African record is often ignored in current scenarios of modern human origins in favor of the much more detailed, well-preserved and better-explored region at the southern end of the continent. Alison S. Brooks (George Washington Univ/Smithsonian Institution) opines that over 20 years of research in the eastern...

In this presentation, Matthew Tocheri (Smithsonian Institution) shows how the morphology of four foot bones – the medial cuneiform, talus, calcaneus, and cuboid – is clearly distinguishable among living gorilla taxa in ways that are relevant to interpreting bipedal evolution in hominins. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 23665]

When many people want to discover the core of human nature, they turn to those people who allegedly are or represent humanity’s original condition, hunter-gatherers. Do hunter-gatherers have a special ability to reveal human nature? Robert Kelly (Univ of Wyoming) examines this question by focusing on the issue of violence. Do hunter-gatherers say that we are inherently predisposed to violence, or...

Kazuo Okanoya (Univ of Tokyo) describes his research with Bengalese finches, a domesticated strain of wild white-rumped munias that were imported from China to Japan 250 years ago. He shows that evolution of song complexity involves not only factors related to sexual selection and species identification, but also to socio-emotional factors due to domestication. He then speculates that language evo...

UC San Diego’s Robert Kluender provides an excellent introductory overview of this symposium which addresses the study of animal domestication, our relationships with domesticated species, and what that might tell us about our own evolution as a species in the more distant past. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28894]

CARTA: Behaviorally Modern Humans: The Origin of Us – Richard “Ed” Green: Interbreeding with Archaic Humans outside Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans are the closest extinct ancestors of modern humans. High-quality genome sequence data is now available from both and has revealed multiple instances of admixture between these archaic hominins and the ancestors of currently living humans. Ed Green...

Research on infancy and childhood among !Kung (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers of northwestern Botswana, the first hunting-gathering group where childhood was quantitatively studied, yielded a distinctive characterization of their patterns of child care and behavioral development, and surveys of prior ethnographic literature suggested that core features of these patterns were seen in other hunter-gather...

Donald Pfaff (Rockefeller Univ) addresses two questions in this talk: First, how is it possible to increase testosterone-fueled aggressive behaviors? Second, what does testosterone do, exactly, in the nerve cell? Understanding all of the ways that testosterone fuels aggression may suggest antidotes: pharmacological, psychological and/or cultural. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and T...

Human beings are animal-machines with added souls. This was famously Descartes’ view, and it’s the view of a good many people today. Nicholas Humphrey (Darwin College) is one of them. He contends that humans have evolved a kind of consciousness that, when egged on by culture, leads them to have an extraordinary view of their own metaphysical importance. In fact, Humphrey believes that it is arguab...

The neural crest is a transitory embryonic tissue that, early in development, gives rise to a very diverse set of tissues and organs including pigment cells (melanocytes), bones, muscles and connective tissues in the head, and the adrenal gland. Tecumseh Fitch (Univ of Vienna) hypothesizes that the selection for tameness during early stages of domestication led to delayed maturation and reduced ou...

In this talk Terrence Deacon (UC Berkeley) describes how the signature pattern of specific brain structure changes can provide evidence to distinguish between the processes associated with domestication. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28898]

Closing remarks and Q&A for the symposium “Domestication and Human Evolution.” Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28903]

In this talk Richard Wrangham (Harvard Univ) puts forth the theory that Homo sapiens are, in fact, a self-domesticated species. He defines “self-domestication” as the evolution of a reduced propensity for reactive aggression (compared to an immediate ancestor), without the active involvement of another species. He then shows that communal sanctions practiced by hunter-gatherers, which depend on pr...

Philipp Khaitovich (PICB, Shanghai) and his team have identified the human-specific delay in timing of neocortical synaptogenesis as one of the molecular mechanisms that potentially underlies the evolution of the human phenotype. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28899]

Anna Kukekova (Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) discusses the genetics-centered view of domestication that was supported by the experimental selection of farm-bred foxes (Vulpes vulpes) at the Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics back in the 1950s. The selection of foxes, some for tame and some for aggressive behavior, yielded two strains with markedly different, genetically determined,...

Robert Wayne (UCLA) presents a historical perspective on dog evolution in this talk. The timing and context of dog domestication is controversial. Wayne’s findings place domestication at a time when humans were migratory hunter-gatherers and suggest that a unique domestication scenario applies to the dog, the only large carnivore ever domesticated. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and...