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Mind the Gap: Cooperative Breeding and the Evolution of Our Unique Features

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Mind the Gap

Abstract

Humans are strikingly different from our close relatives, the great apes, in mind, behavior, and life history. We propose that the evolution of these derived features was a consequence of the adoption of cooperative breeding by early Homo. Among the species that adopted it, cooperative breeding generally produced changes in psychology toward greater prosociality and greater cognitive abilities. We propose that in our ancestors, the major energetic inputs to breeding females due to cooperative breeding explain the derived features of human life history and lifted energetic constraints on brain enlargement. Moreover, in combination with great-ape -level cognitive abilities, the cooperative-breeding psychology led to the evolution of many of the unusual socio-cognitive traits that we now celebrate as uniquely human: pedagogy, extensive cumulative culture, and cultural norms; intensive and nearly indiscriminate within-group cooperation and morality; a cooperative declarative communication system known as language; and full-blown theory of mind.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is large variation in reproductive skew in societies with extensive allomaternal care, from very high, where one breeding pair monopolizes mating (as in meerkats and callitrichid monkeys), to rather low, where all adult group members potentially breed (as in capuchin monkeys and humans). Likewise, species vary in which classes of helpers are the most important (siblings, males, grandmothers). How this variation affects prosociality remains to be examined.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Charles Efferson, Kristen Hawkes, Sarah Hrdy, Karin Isler, and Maria van Noordwijk for valuable discussion or comments on the manuscript, and Peter Kappeler for the invitation to take part in the Freilandtage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Carel P. van Schaik & Judith M. Burkart

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  1. Carel P. van Schaik
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  2. Judith M. Burkart
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Correspondence to Carel P. van Schaik .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Abt. Soziobiologie, Deutsches Primatenzentrum, Kellnerweg 4, Göttingen, 37077, Germany

    Peter M. Kappeler

  2. Dept. Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 90095, U.S.A.

    Joan Silk

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van Schaik, C.P., Burkart, J.M. (2010). Mind the Gap: Cooperative Breeding and the Evolution of Our Unique Features. In: Kappeler, P., Silk, J. (eds) Mind the Gap. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02725-3_22

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