范式解释可能足以解释早期人类的行为进化。我们提出了一个简约的解释,即(1)可以解释一个特定的,经常遇到的,早期人类行为的考古学结果-即,旧石器时代的石头“手斧”的形成-从自由能原理(FEP)的生物学理论角度出发;并且(2)将结果的实例视为事后或追溯,间接佐证.我们的提议认为人类在地质时间尺度上是一个自组织的生物生态系统。我们根据FEP提供了这种自组织的叙述性处理。具体来说,我们指出了“认知惊喜”如何支持早期人类表达零星非正统或异常行为的不断发展的倾向。这种共同进化的倾向给我们留下了旧石器时代文物的遗产,让人想起“蛇和梯子”的外观棋盘游戏,失踪,以及旧石器时代行为的特定考古痕迹的再现。在早和中更新世记录中发现时,人类学家和考古学家经常想象的证据,不寻常的或新颖的行为方面的早期人类上升到一个具象的系统发育“阶梯”的梯级-如果这些对应于认知能力的渐进进化,使日益创新的技术实力的增量成就,最终导致智人的认知优势。该猜想忽略了一个似是而非的可能性,即在Hominina社区(定义见附录1)中,一个非典型的个体的行为可能会被忽略,想象一下,或阐明采用迄今非正统行为的潜在优势。这样的失败,以及各种偶然的人口事故,会导致特殊的个人行为被忽视,因此不被记住。它可能会因为陷阱而消失,顺着一条\'蛇\',事实上,在具象的进化棋盘游戏中;从而导致人类行为进化的不连续性,就像一个进化难题。这个难题让一些受过自然科学和生命科学训练的古人类学家感到不安。他们经常驳回它,用这样的自我辩解来解释它,也许,不同古物种的人类差异具有不同的认知能力,which,据说,可以解释更新世考古记录中存在或不存在这种或那种行为结果或技能的痕迹。我们认为,另一种观点-继承自FEP和个人对其周围环境及其自身反应的“主动推理”-提供了一个平淡无奇的观点,通货紧缩,用简约的方式解释外表,失踪,以及早期人类特定行为结果和技能的再现。
A paradigmatic account may suffice to explain behavioral evolution in early Homo. We propose a parsimonious account that (1) could explain a particular, frequently-encountered, archeological outcome of behavior in early Homo - namely, the fashioning of a Paleolithic stone \'handaxe\' - from a biological theoretic perspective informed by the free energy principle (FEP); and that (2) regards instances of the outcome as postdictive or retrodictive, circumstantial corroboration. Our proposal considers humankind evolving as a self-organizing biological ecosystem at a geological time-scale. We offer a narrative treatment of this self-organization in terms of the FEP. Specifically, we indicate how \'cognitive surprises\' could underwrite an evolving propensity in early Homo to express sporadic unorthodox or anomalous behavior. This co-evolutionary propensity has left us a legacy of Paleolithic artifacts that is reminiscent of a \'snakes and ladders\' board game of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular archeological traces of Paleolithic behavior. When detected in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record, anthropologists and archeologists often imagine evidence of unusual or novel behavior in terms of early humankind ascending the rungs of a figurative phylogenetic \'ladder\' - as if these corresponded to progressive evolution of cognitive abilities that enabled incremental achievements of increasingly innovative technical prowess, culminating in the cognitive ascendancy of Homo sapiens. The conjecture overlooks a plausible likelihood that behavior by an individual who was atypical among her conspecifics could have been disregarded in a community of Hominina (for definition see Appendix 1) that failed to recognize, imagine, or articulate potential advantages of adopting hitherto unorthodox behavior. Such failure, as well as diverse fortuitous demographic accidents, would cause exceptional personal behavior to be ignored and hence unremembered. It could disappear by a pitfall, down a \'snake\', as it were, in the figurative evolutionary board game; thereby causing a discontinuity in the evolution of human behavior that presents like an evolutionary puzzle. The puzzle discomforts some paleoanthropologists trained in the natural and life sciences. They often dismiss it, explaining it away with such self-justifying conjectures as that, maybe, separate paleospecies of Homo differentially possessed different cognitive abilities, which, supposedly, could account for the presence or absence in the Pleistocene archeological record of traces of this or that behavioral outcome or skill. We argue that an alternative perspective - that inherits from the FEP and an individual\'s \'active inference\' about its surroundings and of its own responses - affords a prosaic, deflationary, and parsimonious way to account for appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular behavioral outcomes and skills of early humankind.