Tomasello, M., (1999) The human adaptation to culture
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L., (1992) Psychological foundations of culture
Here is the beginning of the first article:
THE HUMAN ADAPTATION FOR CULTURERead the whole article.
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany; e-mail: tomas@eva.mpg.de
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999.28:509-529. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by University
Key Words: culture, cognition, ontogeny, primates, language
Abstract Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This species-unique form of social cognition emerges in human ontogeny at approximately 1 year of age, as infants begin to engage with other persons in various kinds of joint attentional activities involving gaze following, social referencing, and gestural communication. Young children’s joint attentional skills then engender some uniquely powerful forms of cultural learning, enabling the acquisition of language, discourse skills, tool-use practices, and other conventional activities. These novel forms of cultural learning allow human beings to, in effect, pool their cognitive resources both contemporaneously and over historical time in ways that are unique in the animal kingdom.
CONTENTS
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 510
Primate and Human Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
The Ontogeny of Human Cultural Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513
Joint Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513
Imitative Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .514
Linguistic Symbols and Cognitive Representation. . . . . . . . 516
Nonhuman Primate Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
Japanese Macaque Potato Washing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519
Chimpanzee Tool Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .519
Chimpanzee Gestural Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
Nonhuman Primate Social Learning and Social Cognition . .523
Enculturated Apes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .524
Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
INTRODUCTION
All animal species have unique characteristics and human beings are no exception. Perhaps most important, human beings have some unique cognitive skills. The precise nature of these skills is unknown, but they must be such that they enable a number of species-unique and easily observable behavioral practices, including the following: (a) the creation and use of conventional symbols, including linguistic symbols and their derivatives, such as written language and mathematical symbols and notations; (b) the creation and use of complex tools and other instrumental technologies; and (c) the creation of and participation in complex social organizations and institutions. It is difficult to imagine a more fundamental anthropological question than that of where these complex and species-unique behavioral practices, and the cognitive skills that underlie them, came from.
Recent research on human evolution has provided some important facts that may help us to answer this most basic of questions. First, human beings shared a common ancestor with their nearest primate relatives, Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus, a mere 6 million years ago—about the same time there existed a common ancestor for horses and zebras, lions and tigers, and rats and mice (King & Wilson 1975). Second, for almost two thirds of this 6 million years, the human lineage consisted of one or more species of Australopithicine, which in most recent research are characterized as ape-like in both brain size and behavior (Klein 1989). Third, although controversial, many anthropologists now believe that in the 2 million years of the existence of genus Homo, it has only been during the past several hundred thousand years, with the rise of something like modern humans, that the unique aspects of human cognition have come into full bloom (Stringer & McKie 1996). What these new facts and interpretations establish is the rapidity with which the species-unique aspects of human cognition must have arisen: within the past 6 million years for certain, within the past 2 million years in all likelihood, and within the past half million years according to some respectable theories. The main point is that under none of these scenarios—especially the last—has there been sufficient time for a large number of major cognitive adaptations (contra most of so-called evolutionary psychology) (Tooby & Cosmides 1989, Pinker 1997). If we are searching for the origins of uniquely human cognition, therefore, our search must be for some small difference that made a big difference —some adaptation, or small set of adaptations, that changed the process of primate cognitive evolution in fundamental ways.
In my view there is only one candidate for this small difference that made a big difference and that is human culture. Other primates and mammals are certainly social, and some may even have social organizations for which it is useful to apply the term culture (McGrew 1998). But human social organization is something else again, and this organization was, in my view, an integral part of the process by which human cognition came to have many of its most distinctive characteristics. That is, although the cognition of many mammalian and primate species is influenced in important ways by their social environments, human cognition, at least in its species-unique aspects, is actually socially constituted. In this paper, I attempt to explicate this proposition more fully and to explore some of its most important anthropological implications by systematically comparing the social learning, social cognition, and cultural organization of human beings and their nearest primate relatives.
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