New View of How Humans Moved Away from Apes

Anthropologists studying living hunter-gatherers have revised their view of how early human societies were structured, a shift that yields new insight into how humans evolved away from apes. Early human groups, according to the new view would have been more cooperative and willing to learn from one another than the chimpanzees from which human ancestors split about five million years ago. The advantages of cooperation and social learning then the incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path. Anthropologists have assumed until now that hunter-gatherer bands consist of people fairly closely related to one another much as chimpanzee groups do. Natural selection can reward this kind of cooperative behavior because relatives contain many of the same genes. Then I found this picture and thought it was funny since I snowboard.