“Homo informatio”
Authors: WALKER Michael John 
Published: February 2025

A phylogenetical split, beginning perhaps between 8 and 6 Ma (million years ago) came to separate paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, and homininan ancestors that were unlike Homo sapiens today; neither had yet evolved into their modern physical and behavioural forms. The former were to become woodland-dwellers in multifemale-multimale troops with social hierarchies where prominent parts are played by promiscuous males whose female offspring have little choice after menarche but to seek sexual partners in other troops, hostility between troops notwithstanding, whilst male promiscuity is incompatible with paternal investment or interest in their offspring, which is the preserve of mothers. Contrary to widespread conjecture that the aforementioned social arrangement was that of primeval homininans, a "heretical" proposal is that by 4 Ma the nature of the mosaic landscapes (consisting of grasslands and stands of trees) that were the habitat of australopithecine homininans, had three consequences that would impinge on homininan evolution and differentiate it from that of woodland-dwelling paninans, namely: (1) The diversity of whatever was available to eat was not the same in adjoining habitats each of which may have been constrained by whatever mostly could be scrounged, foraged, eaten, or carried away, within a 2-hour walk; (2) Whatever was scroungeable, forageable, and edible within that distance likely was limited at any time of the year, which meant that voracious social units were necessarily small; (3) Smallness which, in turn, demanded ingenuity and the transmissibiity of existential information in the form of active inference generated by self-evidencing through enacted neuroethological behavioural responses, in line with the free energy principle, by virtue of the broadening of homininan "zones of bounded surprisal" with respect to paninans' zones, both within each homininan social unit and between adjoining homininan units in the landscape, which spread geographically over time as budding small-world information networks (and eventually reached Australia and America, propagated by H. sapiens during the Late (Upper) Pleistocene);(4) The existential continuity of small homininan social units depended on cooperation and sometimes collaboration between social units (maybe ca. 4.2 Ma in Australopithecus anamensis), which, together with the generation of information within each unit, favoured paternal investment in child-rearing in mixed-sex social units and by mixed-sex dispersal of sexually-active partners with establishment of mixed-sex social units at neolocalities nearby (mixed-sex philopatry), which maintained not only heterozygosity but also, most important, kinship links that favoured cooperation and collaboration (rather than hostility) between neighbouring social units: all of that marked a major behavioural shift away from paninan social arrangements. The vulnerability of small fragile social units implies that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of false dawns between ~4.2 Ma (Australopithecus anamensjs) and ~40,000 BCE when all other homininan palaeospecies (including Homo neanderthalensis) had become extinct, leaving Homo sapiens alone in prehistory to roam around the world, the sole depositary of our now highly-evolved homininan hierarchically mechanistic mind conditioned by our unparallelled wide zone of bounded surprisal grounded in active inference in accord with the free energy principle.