Before the rise in behaviorally modern human beings, the timeline is often characterized by severe climatic and environmental changes. The pressures, happening throughout hundreds of thousands of years, modified the course of human evolution.
New research was recently posted in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, aiming to develop a new hypothesis regarding human cognitive evolution called “Complementary Cognition,” which backs up how adapting to fundamental environmental and climactic modifications earlier humans evolved to evolve in various, yet complementary mental patterns.
Dr Helen Taylor, a Research Associate from the University of Strathclyde and Affiliated Scholar of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, stated:
“This system of complementary cognition functions in a way that is similar to evolution at the genetic level but instead of underlying physical adaptation, may underlay our species’ immense ability to create behavioral, cultural and technological adaptations. It provides insights into the evolution of uniquely human adaptations like language suggesting that this evolved in concert with specialization in human cognition.”
The theory suggests that humans cooperatively adapt and evolve culturally via a mechanism of collective cognitive search on top of a regular genetic search, which grants phenotypic adaptation (also known as Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection, which is labelled as a “search” process.
Complementary cognition may be at the base of figuring out the exceptional level of cultural adaption in humans and allows for an explanatory framework for the appearance of language.
The complementary cognition theory joins observations from different disciplines, proving that they can be treated as numerous faces of a fundamental phenomenon.
Complementary cognition helped humanity adapt to the numerous environments, which may be one of the species’ fundamental survival traits.
