Chimpanzee cognition and the roots of the human mind

The origins of the human mind have been a puzzle ever since Darwin (1871, 1872). Despite striking continuities in the behavior of humans and nonhumans, our species also exhibits a suite of abilities that diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom: we create and utilize complex technology, pass cultural knowledge from generation to generation, and cooperate across numerous and diverse contexts. Why do humans exhibit these abilities, but other animals (mostly) do not? This is a fundamental question in biology, psychology, and philosophy. This puzzle involves two main parts. The first is concerned with identifying the psychological capacities that are unique to humans. This phylogenetic question can be addressed through careful comparisons of humans and other animals to pinpoint the cognitive traits that are likely derived in our species. The second is concerned with the function of these capacities, and the context in which they arose. This evolutionary question examines why, from an ultimate perspective, we evolved these specialized capacities in the first place. Solving these puzzles poses a special challenge because it is only possible to directly measure the cognition of living animals. The bodies of extinct species leave traces in the fossil record, and even some behavioral traits exhibit well-understood relationships with physical traits—such as relationships between dentition and dietary ecology, or mating system and sexual size dimorphism. These relationships provide important benchmarks when biologists infer the behavior of extinct species. Unfortunately, cognition does not fossilize, and neither do the brains that generate cognitive abilities. Even those features of neuroanatomy that do leave some trace in the fossil record—such as brain size or particular anatomical landmarks—are often related to the kinds of complex cognitive capacities potentially unique to humans in a coarse fashion. As such, identifying derived human cognitive traits requires reconstructing the mind of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus), and humans (Homo sapiens). This reconstruction then can be used to infer what cognitive characteristics have changed in the human lineage.