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Johnson, D. D. P., Stopka, P., & Knights, S. (2003). Sociology: The puzzle of human cooperation. Nature, 421(6926), 911–2; discussion 912.
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Joffe, T. H., & Dunbar, R. I. (1997). Visual and socio-cognitive information processing in primate brain evolution. Proc Biol Sci, 264(1386), 1303–1307.
Abstract: Social group size has been shown to correlate with neocortex size in primates. Here we use comparative analyses to show that social group size is independently correlated with the size of non-V1 neocortical areas, but not with other more proximate components of the visual system or with brain systems associated with emotional cueing (e.g. the amygdala). We argue that visual brain components serve as a social information 'input device' for socio-visual stimuli such as facial expressions, bodily gestures and visual status markers, while the non-visual neocortex serves as a 'processing device' whereby these social cues are encoded, interpreted and associated with stored information. However, the second appears to have greater overall importance because the size of the V1 visual area appears to reach an asymptotic size beyond which visual acuity and pattern recognition may not improve significantly. This is especially true of the great ape clade (including humans), that is known to use more sophisticated social cognitive strategies.
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Jansen, T., Forster, P., Levine, M. A., Oelke, H., Hurles, M., Renfrew, C., et al. (2002). Mitochondrial DNA and the origins of the domestic horse. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 99(16), 10905–10910.
Abstract: The place and date of the domestication of the horse has long been a matter for debate among archaeologists. To determine whether horses were domesticated from one or several ancestral horse populations, we sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop for 318 horses from 25 oriental and European breeds, including American mustangs. Adding these sequences to previously published data, the total comes to 652, the largest currently available database. From these sequences, a phylogenetic network was constructed that showed that most of the 93 different mitochondrial (mt)DNA types grouped into 17 distinct phylogenetic clusters. Several of the clusters correspond to breeds and/or geographic areas, notably cluster A2, which is specific to Przewalski's horses, cluster C1, which is distinctive for northern European ponies, and cluster D1, which is well represented in Iberian and northwest African breeds. A consideration of the horse mtDNA mutation rate together with the archaeological timeframe for domestication requires at least 77 successfully breeding mares recruited from the wild. The extensive genetic diversity of these 77 ancestral mares leads us to conclude that several distinct horse populations were involved in the domestication of the horse.
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Ishida, N., Oyunsuren, T., Mashima, S., Mukoyama, H., & Saitou, N. (1995). Mitochondrial DNA sequences of various species of the genus Equus with special reference to the phylogenetic relationship between Przewalskii's wild horse and domestic horse. J Mol Evol, 41(2), 180–188.
Abstract: The noncoding region between tRNAPro and the large conserved sequence block is the most variable region in the mammalian mitochondrial DNA D-loop region. This variable region (ca. 270 bp) of four species of Equus, including Mongolian and Japanese native domestic horses as well as Przewalskii's (or Mongolian) wild horse, were sequenced. These data were compared with our recently published Thoroughbred horse mitochondrial DNA sequences. The evolutionary rate of this region among the four species of Equus was estimated to be 2-4 x 10(-8) per site per year. Phylogenetic trees of Equus species demonstrate that Przewalskii's wild horse is within the genetic variation among the domestic horse. This suggests that the chromosome number change (probably increase) of the Przewalskii's wild horse occurred rather recently.
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Isenbugel, E. (2002). [From wild horse to riding horse]. Schweiz Arch Tierheilkd, 144(7), 323–329.
Abstract: Over 45 million years of evolution the horse developed to a highly specialized animal in anatomy, physiology and behavior. No other animal had influenced the economic and cultural history of men to such extent. Hunting prey since the ice age, domesticated 4000 B.C. and used for thousands of years as unique animal all over the world has attained a new role today as partner in sport, as companion animal and even as cotherapeutic. The well known behavioral demands in use and keeping are still often not fulfilled.
Keywords: Animal Husbandry/*history; Animals; Animals, Domestic; Animals, Wild; *Bonding, Human-Pet; Breeding/history; Evolution; Female; History, 15th Century; History, 16th Century; History, 17th Century; History, 18th Century; History, 19th Century; History, 20th Century; History, Ancient; History, Medieval; *Horses/physiology/psychology; Humans; Male; Paintings; Predatory Behavior; Sculpture; Sports/history
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Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, & Ernst Fehr. (2003). Explaining altruistic behavior in humans. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 24(3), 153–172.
Abstract: Recent experimental research has revealed forms of human behavior involving interaction among unrelated individuals that have proven difficult to explain in terms of kin or reciprocal altruism. One such trait, strong reciprocity is a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation, at personal cost, even when it is implausible to expect that these costs will be repaid. We present evidence supporting strong reciprocity as a schema for predicting and understanding altruism in humans. We show that under conditions plausibly characteristic of the early stages of human evolution, a small number of strong reciprocators could invade a population of self-regarding types, and strong reciprocity is an evolutionary stable strategy. Although most of the evidence we report is based on behavioral experiments, the same behaviors are regularly described in everyday life, for example, in wage setting by firms, tax compliance, and cooperation in the protection of local environmental public goods.
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Healy, S., & Braithwaite, V. (2000). Cognitive ecology: a field of substance? Trends. Ecol. Evol, 15(1), 22–26.
Abstract: In 1993, Les Real invented the label 'cognitive ecology'. This label was intended for work that brought cognitive science and behavioural ecology together. Real's article stressed the importance of such an approach to the understanding of behaviour. At the end of a decade in which more interdisciplinary work on behaviour has been seen than for many years, it is time to assess whether cognitive ecology is a label describing an active field.
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Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Human-like social skills in dogs? Trends. Cognit. Sci., 9(9), 439–444.
Abstract: Domestic dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior--even more so than our nearest primate relatives. For example, they use human social and communicative behavior (e.g. a pointing gesture) to find hidden food, and they know what the human can and cannot see in various situations. Recent comparisons between canid species suggest that these unusual social skills have a heritable component and initially evolved during domestication as a result of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression towards humans. Differences in chimpanzee and human temperament suggest that a similar process may have been an important catalyst leading to the evolution of unusual social skills in our own species. The study of convergent evolution provides an exciting opportunity to gain further insights into the evolutionary processes leading to human-like forms of cooperation and communication.
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Hare, B., Plyusnina, I., Ignacio, N., Schepina, O., Stepika, A., Wrangham, R., et al. (2005). Social cognitive evolution in captive foxes is a correlated by-product of experimental domestication. Curr Biol, 15(3), 226–230.
Abstract: Dogs have an unusual ability for reading human communicative gestures (e.g., pointing) in comparison to either nonhuman primates (including chimpanzees) or wolves . Although this unusual communicative ability seems to have evolved during domestication , it is unclear whether this evolution occurred as a result of direct selection for this ability, as previously hypothesized , or as a correlated by-product of selection against fear and aggression toward humans--as is the case with a number of morphological and physiological changes associated with domestication . We show here that fox kits from an experimental population selectively bred over 45 years to approach humans fearlessly and nonaggressively (i.e., experimentally domesticated) are not only as skillful as dog puppies in using human gestures but are also more skilled than fox kits from a second, control population not bred for tame behavior (critically, neither population of foxes was ever bred or tested for their ability to use human gestures) . These results suggest that sociocognitive evolution has occurred in the experimental foxes, and possibly domestic dogs, as a correlated by-product of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression, and it is likely the observed social cognitive evolution did not require direct selection for improved social cognitive ability.
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Hampton, R. R., Sherry, D. F., Shettleworth, S. J., Khurgel, M., & Ivy, G. (1995). Hippocampal volume and food-storing behavior are related in parids. Brain Behav Evol, 45(1), 54–61.
Abstract: The size of the hippocampus has been previously shown to reflect species differences and sex differences in reliance on spatial memory to locate ecologically important resources, such as food and mates. Black-capped chickadees (Parus atricapillus) cached more food than did either Mexican chickadees (P. sclateri) or bridled titmice (P. wollweberi) in two tests of food storing, one conducted in an aviary and another in smaller home cages. Black-capped chickadees were also found to have a larger hippocampus, relative to the size of the telencephalon, than the other two species. Differences in the frequency of food storing behavior among the three species have probably produced differences in the use of hippocampus-dependent memory and spatial information processing to recover stored food, resulting in graded selection for size of the hippocampus.
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