Overview

The behavioural ecological approach, and in some cases a cultural evolutionary approach, has enabled us to address a number of key questions in the evolution of human social behaviour. What were our ancestral families like, did we breed cooperatively, and how has that contributed to our life-history evolution? Why is there diversity in human cultural norms between societies, especially in marriage and kinship systems? What evolutionary mechanisms underpin the unique abilities of humans to coordinate actions between large numbers of only distantly related individuals – individual natural selection or group-level cultural selection? This is far from an exhaustive list of topics in a huge field, but these have been selected because they all illustrate examples of human behaviours that have at least some uniquely human characteristics.

Human social systems are unique, no doubt due to our cognitive capacity. Our life history suggests a long period of learning and slow growth (childhood), which is associated with the cognitive development of our large brains, followed by a period of intense levels of parental investment in numerous offspring who are fed through technologically advanced methods which children generally cannot entirely master until they are at least teenagers. Husbands, grandmothers and other members of the social group can all help defray the costs of rearing multiple costly offspring; although there is still some disagreement about which individuals are most important; it probably depends on ecology.