Human Universals and Primate Symplesiomorphies: Establishing the Lemur Baseline
Human Universals and Primate Symplesiomorphies: Establishing the Lemur Baseline
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DOI：
10.1007/978-3-642-02725-3_19
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发表时间：
2010-01-01
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影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Kappeler, Peter M.
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文献类型：
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作者：
Fichtel, Claudia;Kappeler, Peter M.
社会行为、文化和认知大概是大多数人类共性存在的领域。这些人类特征的识别取决于并依赖于与其他灵长类动物，特别是黑猩猩的比较。这种方法也可以用来重建灵长类和人类的行为进化。因此，可以推断，在人和潘身上发现的特征也存在于他们最后一个共同的祖先中。以此类推，人类和其他灵长类动物共有的特征可以追溯到我们的家谱上更远的地方。在这里，我们看看人类共性的另一面，即最基本的现存灵长类的行为和认知特征，这应该代表了后来建立分类单元专门化的共同灵长类遗产。具体地说，我们回顾了研究马达加斯加狐猴形目灵长类动物认知能力和社会行为的研究。马达加斯加狐猴在这方面尤其重要，因为在链状灵长类动物中，只有它们进化出了群体生活，这是大多数活着的单毛猴的特征。尽管狐猴的大脑比新大陆和东半球的猴子和类人猿相对较小，但它们解决需要技术智力的问题的能力在质量上与单线猴不相上下。然而，在社会智力领域，狐猴在几个方面偏离了更知名的出血模型(即脑猿)。最重要的是，它们的行为策略反映了对群体内部竞争的重视，而不是合作，这可能代表着狐猴特有的对生态不可预测环境的适应，而不是社交智力的根本缺陷。无论如何，包括最早的群居灵长类动物最好的生存模式在内的广泛的比较视角可以丰富对灵长类社会行为的重建和其他进化分析，包括人类的社会行为。
Social behavior, culture, and cognition are domains where presumably most human universals exist. Identification of these derived human traits depends and relies on comparisons with other primates, notably chimpanzees. This approach can also be used to reconstruct primate and human behavioral evolution. Accordingly, traits found in both Homo and Pan can be inferred to have existed in their last common ancestor as well. By analogy, traits shared between humans and other primates can be traced back even further down on our family tree. Here, we look at the other side of human universals, i.e., behavioral and cognitive traits of the most basal living primates, which ought to represent the common primate legacy upon which later taxon-specific specializations were built. Specifically, we review studies investigating cognitive abilities and social behavior of the lemuriform primates of Madagascar. The Malagasy lemurs are particularly important for this purpose because they alone, among strepsirrhine primates, have evolved group-living, which characterizes most living haplorrhines. Even though lemurs have relatively smaller brains than New and Old World monkeys and great apes, their ability to solve problems that require technical intelligence is qualitatively on par with that of haplorrhines. In the domain of social intelligence, however, lemurs deviate from the better-known haplorrhine models (i.e., cercopithecines) in several respects. Most importantly, their behavioral strategies reflect an emphasis on within-group competition, rather than cooperation, which may represent lemur-specific adaptations to an ecologically unpredictable environment, rather than fundamental deficits in social intelligence. In any event, a broad comparative perspective including the best living models of the earliest gregarious primates can enrich reconstructions and other evolutionary analyzes of primate social behavior, including that of humans.