For a fossil to be designated a hominin there must be evidence of upright posture. However, any orthopedic surgeon can tell you that upright posture produces extreme vulnerability for injuries to the lower back (perennially among the top ER visits), hips and knees, so it is reasonable that the evolutionary advantages of such a costly …
Some monogamy facts: 85 percent of birds, 3 to 9 percent of mammals—but fully a quarter of mammals’ primate component—are classed as monogamous. Selected species of primates began evolving monogamous social systems about 16 million years ago, relatively late in their 52-million-year history of group living. In each case, monogamy grew out of a promiscuous mating …
I was aware of the Russian study demonstrating the ease with which foxes could be domesticated. I began to think that somehow a process of self-domestication had taken place as a precursor to the selection inclusion of the dominance and submissive mentalities. So, when I examined the momentous publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils in …
Since I had worked in prison as a young psychiatrist, and had observed the natural facility for communication between individuals within enslaved relationships, I was sure that the interactive human mind was the evolutionary result of the internalization of the relationship that defined the signature primate hierarchical social system—dominance and submission. As discussed in the …
The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997) by Terrence Deacon, a neuroscientist and evolutionary anthropologist is a great book. Here is an independent thinker with an abundance of commonsense writing about the core issue of language and evolution. It has been more than twelve years since I began my love affair …
In my psychiatric training, I felt the Freudian analysis that emotions are divided into id, comprised of ancient primate drives to dominate and the superego, representing the prohibitions of society was self-evident. Starting my career in a prison observing dominant-submissive relationships approaching the model of master and slave, I observed the extraordinary aptitude of a …
The premise in this blog is that, the event that initiated our hominid biological family was the ascendance of the will of individual apes to dominate each other into the entity of group justice in small monogamous hominid bands of 20-30 individuals. But what would drive such a unique natural process? There are two important …
Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi, is arguably the most significant fossil find in the history of paleoanthropology due to its completeness and antiquity – 4.4 M. years, just 1.6 M. years after the last common ancestor with Chimpanzees. The theoretician of the group, Owen Lovejoy hypothesized that the reduction in the size of the male canine …