000133395 001__ 133395
000133395 005__ 20240412150654.0
000133395 0247_ $$2doi$$a10.1016/j.plrev.2024.01.004
000133395 0248_ $$2sideral$$a138094
000133395 037__ $$aART-2024-138094
000133395 041__ $$aeng
000133395 100__ $$0(orcid)0000-0002-1943-340X$$aMarín Manrique, Héctor$$uUniversidad de Zaragoza
000133395 245__ $$a'Snakes and ladders' in paleoanthropology: From cognitive surprise to skillfulness a million years ago
000133395 260__ $$c2024
000133395 5060_ $$aAccess copy available to the general public$$fUnrestricted
000133395 5203_ $$aA paradigmatic account may suffice to explain behavioral evolution in early Homo. We propose a parsimonious account that could explain a particular, frequently-encountered, archeological outcome of behavior in early Homo — namely, the fashioning of a Paleolithic stone ‘handaxe’ — from a biological theoretic perspective informed by the free energy principle (FEP); and that regards instances of the outcome as postdictive or retrodictive, circumstantial corroboration. Our proposal considers humankind evolving as a self-organizing biological ecosystem at a geological time-scale. We offer a narrative treatment of this self-organization in terms of the FEP. Specifically, we indicate how ‘cognitive surprises’ could underwrite an evolving propensity in early Homo to express sporadic unorthodox or anomalous behavior. This co-evolutionary propensity has left us a legacy of Paleolithic artifacts that is reminiscent of a ‘snakes and ladders’ board game of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular archeological traces of Paleolithic behavior. When detected in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record, anthropologists and archeologists often imagine evidence of unusual or novel behavior in terms of early humankind ascending the rungs of a figurative phylogenetic ‘ladder’ — as if these corresponded to progressive evolution of cognitive abilities that enabled incremental achievements of increasingly innovative technical prowess, culminating in the cognitive ascendancy of Homo sapiens. The conjecture overlooks a plausible likelihood that behavior by an individual who was atypical among her conspecifics could have been disregarded in a community of Hominina (for definition see Appendix 1) that failed to recognize, imagine, or articulate potential advantages of adopting hitherto unorthodox behavior. Such failure, as well as diverse fortuitous demographic accidents, would cause exceptional personal behavior to be ignored and hence unremembered. It could disappear by a pitfall, down a ‘snake’, as it were, in the figurative evolutionary board game; thereby causing a discontinuity in the evolution of human behavior that presents like an evolutionary puzzle. The puzzle discomforts some paleoanthropologists trained in the natural and life sciences. They often dismiss it, explaining it away with such self-justifying conjectures as that, maybe, separate paleospecies of Homo differentially possessed different cognitive abilities, which, supposedly, could account for the presence or absence in the Pleistocene archeological record of traces of this or that behavioral outcome or skill. We argue that an alternative perspective — that inherits from the FEP and an individual's ‘active inference’ about its surroundings and of its own responses — affords a prosaic, deflationary, and parsimonious way to account for appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular behavioral outcomes and skills of early humankind.
000133395 540__ $$9info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess$$aby-nc-nd$$uhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/
000133395 655_4 $$ainfo:eu-repo/semantics/article$$vinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
000133395 700__ $$aFriston, Karl John
000133395 700__ $$aWalker, Michael John
000133395 7102_ $$14009$$2735$$aUniversidad de Zaragoza$$bDpto. Psicología y Sociología$$cÁrea Psicolog.Evolut.Educac
000133395 773__ $$g49 (2024), 40-70$$pPhysics of Life Reviews$$tPhysics of Life Reviews$$x1571-0645
000133395 8564_ $$s3484108$$uhttps://zaguan.unizar.es/record/133395/files/texto_completo.pdf$$yVersión publicada
000133395 8564_ $$s2029097$$uhttps://zaguan.unizar.es/record/133395/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon$$xicon$$yVersión publicada
000133395 909CO $$ooai:zaguan.unizar.es:133395$$particulos$$pdriver
000133395 951__ $$a2024-04-12-13:59:28
000133395 980__ $$aARTICLE