RELATION OF HUMANS TO AFRICAN APES: A STATISTICAL APPRAISAL OF DIVERSE TYPES OF DATA11Supported by NIH Grant R01 GM31571

The aim of this article is to set a macro-historical narrative concerning the emergence of warfare and social ethics as symplesiomorphic features in the lineage of Homo sapiens. This means that these two behavioral aspects, representative of a very selected branch in the phylogenetic tree of the Primate order, are shared by the two lineages of great African apes that diverged from a common ancestor around six million years in the past, leading to extant humans and chimpanzees. Therefore, this article proposes an ethological understanding of warfare and social ethics, as both are innate to the social high-specialized modular mind present in the species of genera Pan and Homo. However behavioral restraints to intersocietal coalitionary violence seems to be an exclusive aspect of the transdominial modular cognition that characterizes modern humans. Thus, if in the evolutionary long durée, warfare and restrictions to intrasocial violence both appear to be ethologically common to humans and chimpanzees to a certain extent, an ethics of warfare - and, of course, the cognitive capability for intersocietal peace - seems to be distinctly human.

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Trabecular structure of the elbow reveals divergence in knuckle‐walking biomechanical strategies of African apes

Evolution ◽

10.1111/evo.14354 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Julia Arias‐Martorell ◽

Angel Zeininger ◽

Tracy L. Kivell

Keyword(s):

Trabecular Structure ◽

African Apes

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Celts, Hottentots, and “white chimpanzees”

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691153124.003.0003 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Bruce Nelson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

African Apes ◽

Historical Factors ◽

New Development

This chapter discusses the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century. The English had long compared the Irish with the “savages of America”; a practice dating back to the seventeenth century. However, there was a dramatically new development in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when Darwinian science posited an evolutionary chain of being in which humans were descended directly from African apes. In this context, British commentators created a “simianized,” or apelike, Paddy whose likeness to the “backward” races of Africa was inescapable. At least four major historical factors were at work in Paddy's devolution. They can be encapsulated in the words “empire,” “Fenianism,” “emigration,” and “science.”

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Seven Steps in the Evolution of the Human Imagination

Imaginative Minds ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197264195.003.0001 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

STEVEN MITHEN

Keyword(s):

Cultural Change ◽

Homo Sapiens ◽

Brain Size ◽

Modern Human ◽

Clear Picture ◽

Modern Humans ◽

Creative Imagination ◽

African Apes ◽

Ways Of Thinking ◽

Forms Of Knowledge

The modern human is a product of six million years of evolution wherein it is assumed that the ancestor of man resembles that of a chimpanzee. This assumption is based on the similarities of the ape-like brain size and post-cranial characteristics of the earliest hominid species to chimpanzees. Whilst it is unclear whether chimpanzees share the same foresight and contemplation of alternatives as with humans, it is nevertheless clear that chimpanzees lack creative imagination — an aspect of modern human imagination that sets humanity apart from its hominid ancestors. Creative imagination pertains to the ability to combine different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking to form creative and novel ideas. This chapter discusses seven critical steps in the evolution of the human imagination. These steps provide a clear picture of the gradual emergence of creative imagination in humans from their primitive origins as Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. This chronological evolution of the imaginative mind of humans involves both biological and cultural change that began soon after the divergence of the two lineages that led to modern humans and African apes.

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