Rethinking the evolution of human intelligence

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Humans have very large, complex brains for their size. Why are humans so intelligent and why did we become intelligent so quickly? My dissertation addresses the question of how to model the evolution of human intelligence. The standard model (Flinn et al. 2005) references competition between humans at multiple levels of social organization coupled with human domination of external selection pressures. I place the Flinn model in a research framework, critically compare it to alternative models, explore a potential problem in the model (and propose a solution to it) and finally tackle a prior task: the modeling of coalitional behavior, a necessary component of the Flinn model and its competitors.