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The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language.The timeline of human evolution spans approximately seven million years, [1] from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago.
[47] [48] Brain expansion (enlargement) between 0.8 and 0.2 Ma may have occurred due to the extinction of most African megafauna (which made humans feed from smaller prey and plants, which required greater intelligence due to greater speed of the former and uncertainty about whether the latter were poisonous or not), extreme climate variability ...
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness.Using their intelligence, humans are able to learn, form concepts, understand, and apply logic and reason.
Lahn and the other researchers noted points in the DNA sequences that caused protein alterations. These DNA changes were then scaled to the evolutionary time that it took for those changes to occur. The data showed the genes in the human brain evolved much faster than those of the other species.
For a long time, deciphering how the only surviving species of humans evolved was based on looking at the shapes of fossilised remains of our ancestors living hundreds of thousands of years ago ...
The first debates about the nature of human evolution arose between Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen. Huxley argued for human evolution from apes by illustrating many of the similarities and differences between humans and other apes, and did so particularly in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
The cognitive tradeoff hypothesis argues that in the cognitive evolution of humans, there was an evolutionary tradeoff between short-term working memory and complex language skills. Specifically, early hominids sacrificed the robust working memory seen in chimpanzees for more complex representations and hierarchical organization used in language.