[Marxism-Thaxis] Symbols as unique in human learning
Charles Brown Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:24:14 -0800
This subsection of the
wikipedia article on
culture, brings in
the concept of symbols
as a distinguishing
characteristic of human
culture.
This author distinguishes
imitative from emulative
Using "imitative" differently
than I have been using it.
Emulative would be "monkey see, monkey do."
The kind of learning characteristic of human
children is “Imitative learning,” which “means reproducing an instrumental act
understood intentionally.”[38] Human
infants begin to display some evidence of this form of learning between the
ages of nine and twelve months, when infants
fix their attention not only on an object, but on the gaze of an adult which
enables them to use adults as points of reference and thus “act on objects in
the way adults are acting on them.”
[39] This dynamic is well-documented and has also been termed “joint
engagement” or “joint attention.”[40][41]
Essential to this dynamic is the infants growing
capacity to recognize others as “intentional agents:” people “with the power
to control their spontaneous behavior” and who
“have goals and make active choices among behavioral means for attaining those
goals.”[42]
Culture is “the
imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment.”
CB: The following is what I
try to get at when I say
with a symbol something is represented
by something that it is not. There
is an arbitrary relation between
the sign and the signified:
“In the preparation of the stick for termite-eating, the relation between
product and raw material is
iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no necessary
relation between the form of the final product and the original material.”[60]
CB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#Biological_Anthropology:_the_Evolution_of_Culture
Biological Anthropology: the Evolution of Culture
The taxonomic relationships of Hominoidea
Discussion concerning culture among biological
anthropologists centers around two debates. First, is culture uniquely human
or shared by other species (most notably,
other primates)? This is an important question, as the theory of evolution
holds that humans are descended from non-humans.
Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?
Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor’s
classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists
take this for granted
and thus elide that important qualification from later definitions, merely
equating culture with any learned behavior.
This slippage is a problem because during the formative years of modern
primatology, some primatologists were
trained in anthropology (and understood that culture refers to learned behavior
among humans), and others were
not. Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus
argued that since chimpanzees have learned
behaviors, they have culture.[10][11] Today, anthropological primatologists
are divided, several arguing
that non-human primates have culture, others arguing that they do
not.[12][13][14][15]
This scientific debate is complicated by ethical
concerns. The subjects of primatology are non-human primates, and whatever
culture these primates have is threatened
by human activity. After reviewing the research on primate culture, W.C.
McGrew concluded, "[a] discipline requires
subjects, and most species of nonhuman primates are endangered by their human
cousins. Ultimately, whatever its merit,
cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to the
survival of primate cultures]."[16]
McGrew suggests a definition of culture that
he finds scientifically useful for studying primate culture. He points out
that scientists do not have access to the
subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human primates. Thus, if culture is
defined in terms of knowledge, then scientists
are severely limited in their attempts to study primate culture. Instead of
defining culture as a kind of knowledge,
McGrew suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps in the
process:
A new pattern of behavior is invented, or
an existing one is modified.
The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
The form of the pattern is consistent within
and across performers, perhaps even in terms
of recognizable stylistic features.
The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after
having acquired it.
The pattern spreads across social units
in a population. These social units may be families, clans, troops, or bands.
The pattern endures across generations.[17]
McGrew admits that all six criteria may be
strict, given the difficulties in observing primate behavior in the wild. But
he also insists on the need to be
as inclusive as possible, on the need for a definition of culture that "casts
the net widely":
Culture is considered to be group-specific
behavior that is acquired, at least in part, from social influences. Here,
group is considered to be the
species-typical unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup, or so on. Prima
facia evidence of culture comes
from within-species but across-group variation in behavior, as when a pattern
is persistent in one community
of chimpanzees but is absent from another, or when different communities
perform different versions of the same
pattern. The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the difference
across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological factors ....[18]
As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out,
if “culture” is reduced to “learned behavior,” then all animals have
culture.[19] Certainly all specialists agree
that all primate species evidence common cognitive skills: knowledge of
object-permanence, cognitive mapping,
the ability to categorize objects, and creative problem solving.[20] Moreover,
all primate species show evidence
of shared social skills: they recognize members of their social group; they
form direct relationships based on
degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social relationships;
they predict future behavior;
and they cooperate in problem-solving.[21]
Cast of the skeleton of Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis
One current view of the temporal and geographical
distribution of hominid populationsNevertheless, the term "culture" applies to
non-human animals only if we define
culture as any or all learned behavior. Within mainstream physical
anthropology, scholars tend to think that a
more restrictive definition is necessary. These researchers are concerned with
how human beings evolved to be different
from other species. A more precise definition of culture, which excludes
non-human social behavior, would allow physical
anthropologists to study how humans evolved their unique capacity for
"culture".
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus)
are humans' (Homo sapiens) closest living relative; both are descended from a
common ancestor which lived around five
or six million years ago. This is the same amount of time it took for horses
and zebras, lions and tigers, and rats
and mice, to diverge from their respective common
ancestors [22] The evolution of modern humans
is relative rapid: Australopithicenes evolved
four million years ago and modern humans in past
several hundred thousand years. [23] During this time humanity evolved three
distinctive features:
(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 and participation in complex social organization and
institutions.[24]
According to developmental psychologist
Michael Tomasello, “where these complex and
species-unique behavioral practices, and the cognitive skills that underlie
them, came from” is a fundamental
anthropological question. Given that contemporary humans and chimpanzees are
far more different than horses and zebras,
or rats and mice, and that the evolution of this
great difference occurred in such a short period of time, “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.” According to Tomasello, the answer to this question must
form the basis of a scientific definition
of “human culture.”[25]
In a recent review of the major research on human
and primate tool-use, communication, and learning strategies, Tomasello argues
that the key human advances over primates
(language, complex technologies, complex social organization) are all the
results of humans pooling cognitive resources.
This is called “the ratchet effect:” innovations spread and are shared by a
group, and mastered “by youngsters, which
enables them to remain in their new and improved form within the group until
something better comes along.” The key
point is that children are born good at a particular kind of social learning;
this creates a favored environment
for social innovations, making them more likely to be maintained and
transmitted to new generations than individual
innovations. [26] For Tomasello, human social learning — the kind of learning
that distinguishes humans from other
primates and that played a decisive role in
human evolution — is based on two elements: first, what he calls “imitative
learning,” (as opposed to “emulative learning” characteristic of other
primates) and second,
the fact that humans represent their experiences symbolically (rather than
iconically, as is characteristic of other primates).
Together, these elements enable humans to be both
inventive, and to preserve useful inventions. It
is this combination that produces the ratchet effect.
Chimpanzee mother and baby
Chimpanzee extracting insects
The Japanese Macaques at Jigokudani hotspring
in NaganoThe kind of learning found among other
primates is “emuluation learning,” which “focuses on the environmental events
involved – results or changes of state
in the environment that the other produced – rather than on the actions that
produced those results.”[27][28][29]
Tomasello emphasizes that emulation learning is a highly adaptive strategy for
apes because it focuses on the effects
of an act. In laboratory experiments, chimpanzees
were shown two different ways for using a rake-like tool to obtain an
out-of-reach-object. Both methods were effective,
but one was more efficient than the other. Chimpanzees consistently emulated
the more efficient method.[30]
Examples of emulation learning are well-documented
among primates. Notable examples include Japanese macaque potato washing,
Chimpanzee tool use, and Chimpanzee gestural
communication. In 1953, an 18-month-old female macaque monkey was observed
taking sandy pieces of sweet potato (given to
the monkeys by observers) to a stream (and later, to the ocean) to wash off the
sand. After three months, the same behavior
was observed in her mother and two playmates, and then the playmates’ mothers.
Over the next two years seven other
young macaques were observed washing their potatoes, and by the end of the
third year 40% of the troop had adopted the
practice.[31][32] Although this story is popularly represented as a
straightforward example of human-like learning, evidence suggests that it is
not. Many monkeys naturally brush sand
off of food; this behavior had been observed in the macaque troop prior to the
first observed washing. Moreover, potato
washing was observed in four other separate macaque troops, suggesting that at
least four other individual monkeys had
learned to wash off sand on their own.[33] Other monkey species in captivity
quickly learn to wash off their food.[34] Finally, the spread of learning among
the Japanese macaques was fairly
slow, and the rate at which new members of the
troop learned did not keep pace with the growth of the troop. If the form of
learning were imitation, the rate of learning should have been exponential. It
is more likely that monkeys the
washing behavior is based on the common behavior of cleaning off food, and that
monkeys that spent time by the water
independently learned to wash, rather than wipe their food. This explains both
why those monkeys that kept company with
the original washer, and who thus spent a good deal
of time by the water, also figured out how to wash their potatoes. It also
explains why the rate at which this behavior
spread was relatively slow. [35]
Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of population-specific
tool use: termite-fishing, ant-fishing, ant-dipping, nut-cracking, and
leaf-sponging. Gombe chimpanzees fish for termites using small, thin sticks,
but chimpanzees in Western Africa use large
sticks to break holes in mounds and use their hands to scoop up termites. Some
of this variation may be the result of
“environmental shaping” (there is more rainfall in western Africa, softening
termite mounds and making them easier
to break apart, than in the Gombe reserve in eastern
Africa. Nevertheless it is clear that chimpanzees are good at emulation
learning. Chimpanzee children independently know how
to roll over logs, and know how to eat insects. When children see their mothers
rolling over logs in order to eat the
insects beneath, they quickly learn to do the same. In other words, this form
of learning builds on activities the children already know.[36][37]
Mother and child
Inuit Family
Girls in Xinjiang in northwestern China
Children in Jerusalem
Children in Namibia
The kind of learning characteristic of human
children is “Imitative learning,” which “means reproducing an instrumental act
understood intentionally.”[38] Human
infants begin to display some evidence of this form of learning between the
ages of nine and twelve months, when infants
fix their attention not only on an object, but on the gaze of an adult which
enables them to use adults as points of reference and thus “act on objects in
the way adults are acting on them.”
[39] This dynamic is well-documented and has also been termed “joint
engagement” or “joint attention.”[40][41]
Essential to this dynamic is the infants growing
capacity to recognize others as “intentional agents:” people “with the power
to control their spontaneous behavior” and who
“have goals and make active choices among behavioral means for attaining those
goals.”[42]
The development of skills in joint attention by
the end of a human child’s first year of life provides the basis for the
development of imitative learning in the second year.
In one study 14-month old children imitated an adult’s overly-complex method
of turning on a light, even when they could
have used an easier and more natural motion to the same effect.[43] In another
study, 16-month old children interacted
with adults who alternated between a complex series of motions that appeared
intentional and a comparable set of
motions that appeared accidental; they imitated only those motions that
appeared intentional.[44] Another study of
18-month old children revealed that children imitate actions that adults intend
, yet in some way fail, to perform.[45]
Tomasello emphasizes that this kind of imitative learning “relies
fundamentally on infants’ tendency to identify
with adults, and on their ability to distinguish in the actions of others the
underlying goal and the different means that
might be used to achieve it.”[46] He calls this kind of imitative learning
“cultural learning because the child is not just learning about things from
other persons, she is also learning
things through them — in the sense that she must know something of the adult’s
perspective on a situation to learn the
active use of this same intentional act.” [47][48] He concludes that the key
feature of cultural learning is that it occurs
only when an individual “understands others as intentional agents, like the
self, who have a perspective on the world that
can be followed into, directed and shared”[49]
Emulation learning and imitative learning are two
different adaptations that can only be assessed in their larger environmental
and evolutionary contexts. In one experiment, chimpanzees and two-year-old
children were separately presented
with a rake-like-tool and an out-of-reach object. Adult humans then
demonstrated two different ways to use the tool,
one more efficient, one less efficient. Chimpanzees used the same efficient
method following both demonstrations.
Most of the human children, however, imitated whichever method the adult was
demonstrating. Were chimps and humans to be
compared on the basis of these results, one might
think that Chimpanzees are more intelligent.
From an evolutionary perspective they are equally intelligent, but with
different kinds of intelligence adapted to different
environments.[50] Chimpanzee learning strategies
are well-suited to a relatively stable physical environment that requires
relatively little social cooperation (compared to humans).
Human learning strategies are well-suited to a complex social environment in
which understanding the intentions of others may
be more important than success at a specific task.
Tomasello argues that this strategy has made possible the “ratchet effect”
that enabled humans to evolve complex social
systems that have enabled humans to adapt to virtually every physical
environment on the surface of the earth.[51]
Tomasello further argues that cultural learning
is essential for language-acquisition. Most children
in any society, and all children in some, do not learn all words through the
direct efforts of adults. “In general, for the
vast majority of words in their language, children must find a way to learn in
the ongoing flow of social interaction,
sometimes from speech not even addressed to them.”[52]
This finding has been confirmed by a variety of experiments in which children
learned words even when the referent was
not present, multiple referents were possible, and the adult was not directly
trying to teach the word to the child.
[53][54][55] Tomasello concludes that “a linguistic symbol is nothing other
than a marker for an intersubjectively shared understanding of a situation.[56]
Tomasello’s 1999 review of the research contrasting
human and non-human primate learning strategies confirms biological
anthropologist Ralph Holloway’s 1969 argument that a specific kind of sociality
linked to symbolic cognition were
the keys to human evolution, and constitute the nature of culture. According to
Holloway, the key issue in the
evolution of H. sapiens, and the key to understanding “culture,” “is how man
organizes his experience.” Culture is “the
imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment.”
[57] This fact, Holloway argued, is primary to and explains what is distinctive
about human learning strategies,
tool-use, and language. Human tool-making and language express “similar, if not
identical, cognitive processes” and provide
important evidence for how humankind evolved.[58]
In other words, whereas McGrew argues that
anthropologists must focus on behaviors like
communication and tool-use because they have no access to the mind, Holloway
argues that human language and tool-use, including the earliest stone tools in
the fossil record, are highly
suggestive of cognitive differences between humans and non-humans, and that
such cognitive differences in turn explain human evolution. For Holloway, the
question is not whether other
primates communicate, learn or make tools, but that the way they do these
things. “Washing potatoes in the ocean … stripping branches of leaves to get
termites,” and other examples of primate
tool-use and learning “are iconic, and there is no feedback from the
environment to the animal .”[59] Human tools, however, express an independence
from natural form that manifests
symbolic thinking. “In the preparation of the stick for termite-eating, the
relation between product and raw material is
iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no necessary
relation between the form of the final product and the original material.”[60]
In Holloway’s view, our non-human ancestors,
like those of modern chimpanzees and other primates, shared motor and sensory
skills, curiosity, memory, and intelligence,
with perhaps differences in degree. “It is when these are integrated with the
unique attributes of arbitrary production
(symbolization) and imposition that man qua cultural man appears.” [61]
I have suggested above that whatever culture may be,
it includes “the imposition of arbitrary forms upon the environment.” This
phrase has two components. One is a recognition
that the relationship between the coding process and the phenomenon (be it a
tool, social network, or abstract principle) is non-iconic. The other is an
idea of man as a creature who can make delusional
systems work – who imposes his fantasies, his non-iconic constructs (and
constructions) , upon the environment. The altered
environment shapes his perceptions, and these are again forced back on the
environment, are incorporated into the environment, and press for further
adaptation.[62]
This is comparable to the “ratcheting” aspect
suggested by Tomasselo and others that enabled human evolution to accelerate.
Holloway concludes that the first
instance of symbolic thought among humans provided a “kick-start” for brain
development, tool complexity, social
structure, and language to evolve through a constant dynamic of positive
feedback. “This interaction between the
propensity to structure the environment arbitrarily and the feedback from the
environment to the organism is an
emergent process, a process different in kind from anything that preceded it
.”[63]
Arbitrariness
Magritte The Treachery of Images
Ancient stone tools
Simple-Edge Chopper
Chopping-tool
Unretouched bifaceLinguists Charles Hockett and
R. Ascher have identified thirten design-features of language, some shared by
other forms of animal connunication. One
feature that distinguishes human language is its tremendous productivity; in
other words, competent speakers of a language
are capable of producing an infinite number of
original utterances. This productivity seems to be made possible by a few
critical features unique to human language.
One is “duality of patterning,” meaning that
human language consists of the articulation of several distinct processes,
each with its own set of rules:
combining phonemes to produce morphemes, combining morphemes to produce words,
and combining words to produce sentences.
This means that a person can master a relatively limited number of signals and
sets of rules, to create infinite combinations.
Another crucial element is that human language is symbolic: the sound of words
(or their shape, when written) bear no
relation to what they represent.[64] In other words, their meaning is
arbitrary. That words have meaning is a matter
of convention. Since the meaning of words are arbitrary, any word may have
several meanings, and any object may be referred
to using a variety of words; the actual word used to describe a particular
object depends on the context, the intention of the
speaker, and the ability of the listener to judge these appropriately. As
Tomasello notes,
An individual language user looks at a tree and,
before drawing the attention of her interlocutor to that tree, must decide,
based on her assessment of the listener’s
current knowledge and expectations, whether to say “that tree over there,”
“it,” “the oak,” “that hundred-year-oak,”
“the tree,” “the bagswing tree,” “that thing in the front yard,” “the
ornament,” “the embarrassment,” or any of a
number of other expressions. … And these decisions are not made on the basis
of the speaker’s direct goal with respect
to the object or activity involved, but rather that they are made on the basis
of her goal with respect to the listener’s
interest and attention to that object or activity.
This is why symbolic cognition and communication and imitative learning go
hand-in-hand.[65]
Holloway argues that the stone-tools associated with
genus Homo have the same features of human language:
Returning to matter of syntax, rules, and
concatenated activity mentioned above, almost any model which describes a
language process can also be used to describe
tool-making. This is hardly surprising. Both activities are concatenated, both
have rigid rules about eh serialization
of unit activities (the grammar, syntax), both are hierarchical systems of
activity (as is any motor activity), and both produce arbitrary configurations
which thence become part of the environment, either temporarily or permanently.
[66]
…productivity can be seen in the facts that
basic types were probably used for multiple purposes, that tool industries tend
to expand with time, and that a slight
variation on h basic pattern may be made to met some new functional requisite.
Elements of a basic “vocabulary” of
motor operations – flakes, detachment, rotation, preparation of striking
platform, etc. – are used in different combinations to produce dissimilar
tools, with different forms, and supposedly, different uses …. Taking each
motor event alone, no one action is complete;
each action depends on the prior one and requires a further one, and each is
dependent in another ay on the original plan.
In other words, at each point of the action except the last, the piece is not
“satisfactory” in structure. Each unit action
is meaningless by itself in the sense of the use of the tool; it is meaningful
only in the context of the whole
completed set of actions culminating in the final
product. This exactly parallels language.[67]
As Tomasillo has demonstrated, symbolic thought can operate only in a
particular social environment:
Arbitrary symbols enforce consensus of perceptions,
which not only allows members to communicate about the same objects in terms o
space and time (as in hunting) but it
also makes it possible for social relationships to be standardized and
manipulated through symbols. It means that
idiosyncracies are smoothed out and perceived within classes of behavior. By
enforcing perceptual invariance, symbols
also enforce social behavioral constancy, and enforcing social behavioral
constancy is a prerequisite to differential
task-role sectors in a differentiated social group adapting not only to the
outside environment but to its own membership.[68]
Biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon,
in a synthesis of over twenty years of research on human evolution, human
neurology, and primatology, describes this
"ratcheting effect" as a form of "Baldwinian Evolution." Named after
psychologist James Baldwin, this describes
a situation in which an animal's behavior has evolutionary consequences when it
changes the natural environment and
thus the selective forces acting on the animal.[69]
Once some useful behavior spreads within a
population and becomes more important for subsistence, it will generate
selection pressures on genetic traits that support its propagation ... Stone
and tymbolic tools, which were initially acquired with the aid of flexible
ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned the tables on their users and forced
them to adapt to a new niche opened by these technologies. Rather than being
just useful tricks, these behavioral proshteses for obtaining food and
organizing social behaviors became indispensible elements in a new adaptive
complex. The origin of "humanness" can be defined as that point in our
evolution where these tools became the principle source of selection on our
bodies and brains. It is the diagnostic of Homo symbolicus.[70]
According to Deacon, this occured between 2 and 2.5 million years ago, when we
have the first fossil evidence of stone tool use and the beginning of a trend
in an increase in brain size. But it is the evolution of symbolic language
which is the cause — and not the effect — of these trends.[71] More
specifically, Deacon is suggesting that Australopithecines, like contemporary
apes, used tools; it is possible that over the millions of years of
Australopithecine history, many troops developed symbolic communication
systems. All that was necessary was that one of these groups so altered their
environment that "it introduced selection for very different learning abilities
than affected prior species."[72] This troop or population kick-started the
Baldwinian process (the "ratchet effect") that led to their evolution to genus
Homo.
The question for Deacon is, what behavioral-environmental changes could have
made the development of symbolic thinking adaptive? Here he emphasizes the
importance of distinguishing hmans from all other species, not in order to
privilege human intelligence but to problematize it. Given that the evolution
of H. sapiens began with ancestors who did not yet have "culture," what led
them to move away from cognitive, learning, communication, and tool-making
strategies that were and continued to be adaptive for most other primates (and,
some have suggested, most other species of animals)? Learning symbol systems is
more time consuming than other forms of communication, so symbolic thought made
possible a different communication strategy, but not a more efficient one than
other primates. Nevertheless, it must have offered some selective advantage of
H. sapiens to have evolved. Deacon starts by looking a two key determinents in
evolutionary history: foraging
behavior, and patterns of sexual relations. As he observes competition for
sexual access limits the possibilities for social cooperation in many species.
Yet, Deacon observes, there are three consistent patterns in human reproduction
that distinguish them from other speices:
Both males and females usually contribute effort towards the rearing of their
offspring, though often to differing extents and in very different ways.
In all societies, the great majority if adult males and females are bound by
long-term, exlusive secual access rights and pronibitions to particular
individuals of the opposite sex.
They maintain these exclusive sexual relations while living in modest to
large-sized, multi-male, multi-female, cooperative social groups.[73]
Moreover, there is one feature common to all known human foraging societies
(all humans prior to ten or fifteen thousand years ago), and markedly different
from other primates: "the use of meat ... The appearance of the first stone
tools nearly 2.5 million years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical
shift in foraging behavior in order to gain access to meat."[74] Deacon does
not believe that symbolic thought was necessary for hunting or tool-making
(although tool-making may be a reliable index of symbolic thought); rather, it
was necessary for the success of distinctive social relations.
The key is that while men and women are equally effective foragers, mothers
carrying dependent children are not effective hunters. They must thus depend on
male hunters. This favors a system in which males have exclusive sexual access
to females, and females can predict that their sexual partner will provide food
for them and their children. In most mammalian species the result is a system
of rank or sexual competition that results in polygyny, or life-long
pair-bonding between two individuals who live relatively independent of other
adults of their species; in both cases male aggression plays an important role
in maintaining sexual access to mate(s). What is unique about humans?
Human reliance on resources that are relatively unavailable to females with
infants selects not only for coopartion between a child's father and mother but
also for the cooperation of other relatives and friends, including elderly
individuals and juveniles, who can be relied upon for assistance. The special
demands of acquiring meat and caring for infants in our own evolution together
contribute to the underlying impetus for the third characteristic feature of
human reproductive patterns: cooperative group living.[75]
What is uniquely characteristic about human societies is what required symbolic
cognition, which consequently leads to the evolution of culture: "cooperative,
mixed-sex social groups, with significant male care and provisioning of
offspring, and relatively stable patterns of reproductive exclusion." This
combination is relatively rare in other species because it is "highly
susceptible to disintegration." Language and culture provide the glue that
holds it together.[76]
Chimpanzees also, on occasion, hunt meat. In most cases however males consume
the meat immediately, and only on occasion share with females who happen to be
nearby. Among chimpanzees, hunting for meat increases when other sources of
food become scarce, but under these conditions, sharing descreases. The first
forms of symbolic thinking made stone-tools possible which made hunting for
meat a more dependable source of food for our non-human ancestors, while also
making possible forms of social communication that make sharing — between males
and females but also among males, decreasing sexual competition:
So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-supplemented
subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized without a social structure
which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive mating and is sufficiently
egalitarian to sustain cooperation via shared or parallel reproductive
interests. This problem can be solved symbolically.[77]
For it is symbols and symbolic thinking that make possible a central feature of
social relations in every human population, reciprocity. Evolutionary
scientists have developed a model to explain reciprocal altruism among closely
related individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible reciprocity between
distantly related individuals.[78]
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