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. 2002 Jul 23;99(15):10221-6.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.152502899. Epub 2002 Jul 16.

The emergence of humans: the coevolution of intelligence and longevity with intergenerational transfers

Hillard S Kaplan  1 , Arthur J Robson
Affiliations

The emergence of humans: the coevolution of intelligence and longevity with intergenerational transfers

Hillard S Kaplan et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Two striking differences between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are the size of our brains (larger by a factor of three or four) and our life span (longer by a factor of about two). Our thesis is that these two distinctive features of humans are products of coevolutionary selection. The large human brain is an investment with initial costs and later rewards, which coevolved with increased energy allocations to survival. Not only does this theory help explain life history variation among primates and its extreme evolution in humans; it also provides new insight into the evolution of longevity in other biological systems. We introduce and apply a general formal demographic model for constrained growth and evolutionary tradeoffs in the presence of life-cycle transfers between age groups in a population.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Net food production and mortality: human foragers and chimpanzees. On the left, the vertical axis is net production in calories per day and on the right is the mortality hazard per year, smoothed with a locally weighted 5-yr running average after age 5. Details on all sources and estimation procedures for both human and chimpanzee production and consumption data are in supporting information on the PNAS web site at www.pnas.org and in ref. .
Figure 2
Figure 2
Cumulative expected net caloric production by age: humans and chimpanzees. Data sources are the same as those in Fig. 1.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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