The Emergence of Humans: The Coevolution of Intelligence and Longevity with Intergenerational Transfers

Two striking differences between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are the size of our brains (larger by a factor of three or four) and our life span (longer by a factor of about two). Our thesis is that these two distinctive features of humans are products of coevol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2002-07, Vol.99 (15), p.10221-10226
Main Authors: Kaplan, Hillard S., Robson, Arthur J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Animals
Apes
Biological Evolution
Brain
Brain - anatomy & histology
Brain - physiology
Capital investments
Chimpanzees
Evolution
Hominidae - anatomy & histology
Hominidae - physiology
Hominidae - psychology
Hominids
Humans
Hunter gatherers
Intelligence
Intelligence - physiology
Life expectancy
Life span
Longevity
Longevity - physiology
Models, Biological
Monkeys & apes
Mortality
Primates
Productivity
Social Sciences
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Summary:Two striking differences between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are the size of our brains (larger by a factor of three or four) and our life span (longer by a factor of about two). Our thesis is that these two distinctive features of humans are products of coevolutionary selection. The large human brain is an investment with initial costs and later rewards, which coevolved with increased energy allocations to survival. Not only does this theory help explain life history variation among primates and its extreme evolution in humans; it also provides new insight into the evolution of longevity in other biological systems. We introduce and apply a general formal demographic model for constrained growth and evolutionary tradeoffs in the presence of life-cycle transfers between age groups in a population.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.152502899