An economic model and evidence of the evolution of human intelligence in the Middle Pleistocene: Climate change and assortative mating.

ABSTRACT: A main objective of this paper is to provide the first model of how climate change, working through sexual selection, could have led to dramatic increases in hominin brain size, and presumably intelligence, in the Middle Pleistocene. The model is built using core elements from the field of family economics, including assortative mating and specialization and complementarities between mates. The main assumptions are that family public goods (e.g., conversation, shelter, fire) were particularly cognitively intensive to produce and became increasingly important for child survival during glacial phases. Intermediate climates (e.g., not the depths of severe glacial phases) create the largest gains from specialization, encouraging negative assortative mating. In contrast, severe glacial phases e

SUBMITTER: Petersen BC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10395973 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature