A Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Perspective on Human Success

Abstract

Abstract Humans are the last remaining species of hominin, having successfully bested our last human competitors about 50,000 years ago. Big brains and stone tools long predate this success, so why has our recent explosion in biomass happened so recently? This chapter proposes that cultural adaptations, changes in our social organization, and increasing population density led to further developments in cumulative complex culture. In the past 10,000 years, a process of runaway environmental mutualism between humans’ population size, technological complexity, and subsistence productivity has led us through demographic transitions toward an increasing reliance on culture to manage environmental variation. Will our current trajectory lead us to predictable boom-and-bust cycles of population growth or to some sustainable equilibrium? Or will our fleeting success turn out to leave but a thin layer of marine sediments rich in anthropogenic detritus investigated by horseshoe crabs? Perhaps it is too soon to tell.