ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The human life history is adapted to exploit the adaptive advantages of culture.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human Life History is Shaping Embodied Medicinal Plant Knowledge Across the Lifespan.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Valuing Behavioral By-Products: Evolutionary Significance of Neutrally Drifting and Exaptive Cultures in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Stay social, stay young: a bioanthropological outlook on the processes linking sociality and ageing.GeroScience · 2025Review
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Variability and harshness shape flexible strategy-use in support of the constrained flexibility framework.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Understanding the gut microbiota by considering human evolution: a story of fire, cereals, cooking, molecular ingenuity, and functional cooperation.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2024Review
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Life history impacts on infancy and the evolution of human social cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A neurobiological perspective on social influence: Serotonin and social adaptation.Journal of neurochemistry · 2022Review
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A Double-Track Pathway to Fast Strategy in Humans and Its Personality Correlates.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The Frailty Puzzle: Searching for Immortality or for Knowledge Survival?Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2022Review
- Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Memory for medicinal plants remains in ancient and modern environments suggesting an evolved adaptedness.PloS one · 2021Article
- Experimental evolutionary simulations of learning, memory and life history.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The emergence of emotionally modern humans: implications for language and learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Introduction to special issue: 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans evolved from an ape ancestor that was highly intelligent, moderately social and moderately dependent on cultural adaptations for subsistence technology (tools). By the late Pleistocene, humans had become highly dependent on culture for subsistence and for rules to organize a complex social life. Adaptation by cultural traditions transformed our life history, leading to an extended juvenile period to learn subsistence and social skills, post-reproductive survival to help conserve and transmit skills, a dependence on social support for mothers of large-brained, very dependent and nutrient-demanding offspring, males devoting substantial effort to provisioning rather than mating, and the cultivation of large social networks to tap pools in information unavailable to less social species. One measure of the success of the exploitation of culture is that the minimum inter-birth interval of humans is nearly half that of our ape relatives. Another measure is the wide geographical distribution of humans compared with other apes, based on subsistence systems adapted to fine-scale spatial environmental variation. An important macro-evolutionary question is why our big-brained, culture-intensive life-history strategy evolved so recently and in only our lineage. We suggest that increasing spatial and temporal variation in the Pleistocene favoured cultural adaptations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.
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