How many of these universals are shared with other mammals (especially apes)?
I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
Our cat has perfected the guilt-tripping innocent stare. She stands beside her food bowl looking almost blank. This somehow communicates a combination of infinite sadness and disappointment, blended with child-like hopefulness.
It's very effective.
What's wild is that we're apparently directly responsible for the eyebrow thing in dogs. As in we literally bred the feature into them.
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1820653116
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dogs-eyeb...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/dogs-eyebrows-evo...
My pet theory is that women bonded with dogs first through an ability to have a mutual understanding with non-verbal communication, and we most likely observed them and could "talk" to them in their own ways - something that has been lost as we turned dogs from inter-species partners to enslaved commodities.
We're slowly starting to rediscover it.
For those unaware: prehistorical "hunter-gatherer" societies likely did not have strong divisions of labor and there is no evidence to suggest such a universal division across gender lines. Quite the opposite, actually. Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much and women in turn aren't inherently better at child rearing (which historically was a group activity shared by the entire tribe).
Another example is how a lot of national mythologies were invented largely out of thin air in the 17th through 19th centuries, e.g. the Scottish clan system with its strict lineages and tartans. Most of the mythology around kilts is pure fabrication.
Even in economics this can be found with the common wisdom that money/currency was preceded by bartering, which we now know to be an oversimplification to the point of being wrong with in-group gift economies apparently having been far more common and bartering being part of diplomacy between separate groups rather than something you'd do with your neighbor.
Arguably this tendency even persisted to the point where the myth of an "alpha wolf" arose based on observations of wolves in captivity that was quickly dispelled after actually looking at wolves able to roam in their natural environment.
If you want to present the Victorian Age as the pinnacle of human development, of course you'll see the "uncivilised" natives as beneath you in every way and after hunting their prey animals for game and destroying their natural resources claim that starvation is just part of their natural experience rather than something you inflicted on them by taking away their livelihoods. Luckily most fields of study have moved away from this antiquated approach but sadly there's a growing call among certain people to "return to tradition" and dismiss this as "woke" nonsense.
Even if women and men are equal in their hunting skill, it would still make evolutionary sense for women not to participate in the hunts. Hunting large mammals is dangerous, and men are more disposable than women. If a tribe loses most of its men, it can still survive since a single man can impregnate multiple women. Whereas if a tribe loses most of its women it is far more likely to die out.
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)