Editorial: Integrative Science of Human History: How Can Psychology, Archeology, Anthropology and Biology Work Together

Abstract

Lately launched research project of "Integrative human historical science of Out-of-Eurasia: Exploring the mechanisms of the development of civilization" (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas; 2019-2023 [http://out-of-eurasia.jp/en/ index.html], hereafter the project) is trying to generate thorough collaborations among various academic fields of humanities and natural sciences, including archeology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, genomics, among potential others. Through this integrative approach, its expectation is to understand the dynamical process of the creation of human civilizations over the history, in which human as a biological organism (comprised of genes, body, brain…) produced culture, while the man-made environment and social norms formed thereby became the uniquely human niche (environment of adaptation), and thereafter acclimation to the latter produced additional changes in the former human body and cognition resulting in further modification of environment… Therefore, archaeological, historical and modern civilizations created by humans should strongly reflect the cognitive traits that evolved specific to Homo sapiens at the times. This special issue is a collection of articles to illustrate challenges of the project seeking how Psychology, Archeology, Anthropology and Biology, and other related disciplines, can work together to understand the scientific mechanisms of human history.The first three articles are contributions from psychology to integrative human historical science. Ueda et al. (2021) propose a three-level approach to understand cultural variability and evolution of human attention, combining hypothesis-driven experiments, large-scale database, and corpus-based analyses. They hypothesize that human attentional mechanism co-evolves with objects in our environment, especially various artifacts. This article reports the initial application of the three-level approach to the study of visual search and Stroop effect. Kawabata et al. ( 2021) explore a novel way of collaboration between cognitive psychology and archeology, which investigated perception of archeological clay figure faces by modern humans. They discovered that perceived expression differed significantly across figures' historical periods, providing a