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Record W2260982967

What Was the EEA Really Like

2010· article· en· W2260982967 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Peter J. Richerson

Bibliographic record

VenueSSRN Electronic Journal · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPleistoceneHomo erectusHomo sapiensUpper PaleolithicGlacial periodPaleontologyStone toolHuman evolutionMiddle Stone AgeEarly PleistoceneGeographyArchaeologyGeology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Evolutionary Anthropologists and Psychologists often say that humans evolved our characteristic adaptations in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, those past environments that furnished the selection pressures that shaped our brains and bodies. This is true by definition, but when and where were these environments and what were they like are open questions. It is often said, carelessly, that the Pleistocene was the EEA and that human hunter-gatherers were shaped by “the” environment over the past 2 million years. Living hunter-gathers like the San, the Ache, and the Inuit are often taken to be representative of what the EEA produced. This conventional picture does not look much like what the Pleistocene and adaptations to it were really like, insofar as we can infer from what little paleoanthropologists and paleoecologists can tell us. First, Pleistocene environments were very variable and the pattern of variability changed dramatically over the course of the Pleistocene. Adaptations of Homo erectus and related Lower Pleistocene hominins might have been very different from later form in the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Second, even late Pleistocene H. sapiens populations mostly made fairly simple Middle Paleolithic stone tools not accompanied by any art or other symbolic artifacts. Third, H. sapiens populations in West Eurasia, and perhaps our H. neandertalensis relatives in the same region, began making fancy Upper Paleolithic toolkits about 40,000 years ago in the middle of the last glacial. Earlier H. sapiens populations in Africa very occasionally made intermediate toolkits in short episodes. But the African pioneers who swept eastward into Asia and Australia seemed to have made comparatively Middle Paleolithic simple tools until very late in time. Fifth, We know next to nothing about the social organization of any Pleistocene peoples. Sixth, Last Glacial people appear to have been highly carnivorous. In the Holocene, most human populations soon switched to plant intensive diets, leading in some populations to agriculture. Populations became denser and more highly organized socially. These changes gave rise to a number of genetic changes as people adjusted to an environment that had been transformed by culture. Seventh, contemporary modern civilization is probably leading to ongoing selection on genes. Welcome to the EEA! We’re still in it.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.057

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.008
Scholarly communication0.0080.007
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.007

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.276
Teacher spread0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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