ABSTRACT

Humans are evolved primates, closely related to the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). To understand humans, then, it is necessary to understand the Darwinian selection pressures that worked on the anatomy and neuroanatomy of primates over the last 63 million years. To understand why humans behave as they do, and why they could create societies organized by culture, requires that we look back in time to see the selection pressures working on the evolution of hominins, or those great-ape like species on the human line of evolution. Fortunately, there is a methodological technique for doing so, termed cladistic analysis, in biology that allows us to examine the behaviors and social structures of great apes and, by doing so, to see back millions of years to the emergence and then evolution of the hominin line leading to Homo sapiens. Such as an approach is critical to the new evolutionary sociology.