Pourquoi les Homo sapiens ont-ils supplanté les néandertaliens ? Pour une équipe de chercheurs de Cambridge, c'est parce qu'ils ont domestiqué des chiens et renforcé ainsi leurs capacités de survie. Les yeux de l'homme moderne ont en effet subi une évolution, unique parmi les primates évolués, qui a entraîné l'apparition d'une partie blanche autour de l'iris, renforçant leur faculté de communiquer par le regard [...].
Philosophie magazine, 07-08/2012, p. 20.
Quelques informations complémentaires...
[...] The changes in the human eye may be adaptations to enhance the effectiveness of the gaze signal.
[...] Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, developed this idea as the “cooperative eye hypothesis.” They suggested that cooperation among humans was facilitated by the ability to recognize where others were looking.
[...] In decades of observations at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed two chimps, probably brothers, who had white sclerae.
Photograph courtesy of Geza Teleki.
[...] Although chimps hunt small prey, often cooperatively, meat makes up less than 2 percent of their diet, whereas Paleolithic humans hunted much larger game that apparently provided a significant part of their diet. Obviously, silent communication among humans would be advantageous for hunting in groups. But there is another skilled gaze-reader: the domestic dog.
[...] A dog will follow the gaze of a videotaped human if the human first attracts the dog’s attention by speaking to it and looking at it, according to results published by Ernõ Téglás, of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and his colleagues. Indeed, dogs perform as well as human infants at following the gaze of a speaker in tests in which the speaker’s head is held still.
[...] Once dogs could read a human gaze signal, they would have been even more useful as hunting partners.
[...] The dogs improved hunting success by increasing the rate at which the hunters encountered game. Finding game “is often the hardest skill to learn for human hunters,” Koster and Tankersley write.
[...] If Neandertals did not have domestic dogs and anatomically modern humans did, these hunting companions could have made all the difference in the modern human–Neandertal competition.
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