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Artifacts, Symbols, Thoughts

  • Thematic Issue Article: Symbols, Signals, and the Archaeological Record II
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Abstract

Until relatively recently, it was often supposed that changes in the material record of hominin life indexed advances in hominin cognitive sophistication in a relatively direct way. In particular, the “Upper Paleolithic Transition”—an apparently abrupt increase in the complexity and disparity of our material culture—was thought to signal the arrival of the fully human mind. While the idea of a direct relationship between material complexity and cognitive sophistication still has some defenders, this view has largely been abandoned. It is now widely appreciated that aspects of ancient hominins’ demographic and social organization have a powerful influence both on the material culture they need and the material culture they can sustain. But if this more nuanced view is right (and I shall defend it), what does the deep material record tell us about the evolution of hominin cognition? I explore that question in this article.

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Notes

  1. Karl Niklas and Chris Marshall have shown that as the number of distinct adaptive demands on an agent increases, so too does the number of different but equally good trade-offs: there is a connection between the complexity of the selective environment and diversity (Niklas 2002; Marshall 2006). If plants only had to maximize the sunlight their leaves intercepted, they would all look the same.

  2. Perhaps then the slow change and limited local diversity of the Oldowan and the first half of the Acheulian is a signal of cognitive constraint, limiting those early hominins to ecological zones to which their somewhat inflexible technical competences were well-suited. This is a difficult idea to assess, though, given that the record might well mask important differences in soft materials technologies.

  3. They are by no means alone in suggesting that this list of new and supposedly diagnostic features was not theoretically principled. See, for example: Henshilwood and Marean (2006); Henshilwood and Dubreil (2011).

  4. Peter Hiscock has pointed out to me that efficiently organizing workspaces probably has very ancient origins, with the transport of carcasses to butchery sites, sometimes already prepared with stone tools cached there, where the carcass can be divided efficiently and safely.

  5. Or increase it, in socially dysfunctional environments.

  6. Good work habits, like other skills, can be practiced and improved. I regularly remind my graduate students of this truth.

  7. This is a somewhat down-market reading of the core idea of embodied cognition: there are more radical versions that fuse it with the rejection of the representational theory of mind.

  8. Hubert Dreyfus (1992) built his whole critique of the program of classical artificial intelligence on this fact.

  9. Very likely, this is not the only factor involved in the evolution of the extraordinary levels of our neural plasticity.

  10. Fission–fusion social environments are ones in which members of the group spend some time together (often at night) but split into smaller foraging parties at other times. In chimps, the fission–fusion cycle is essentially daily, but some human foragers have longer cycles.

  11. This makes archaeologists’ recent enthusiasm for neural imaging studies somewhat puzzling. This enthusiasm makes sense if the assumption is that neural organization is likely to be highly conserved over the phylogenetic history of the hominins. But the enthusiasm seems to be shared by archaeologists whose views on plasticity are inconsistent with that assumption: Renfrew (2008), Malafouris (2010), perhaps Stout (Stout and Chaminade 2012).

  12. Think of the differences in social tolerance in chimp and bonobo social groups.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the audiences at Melbourne, Wellington, and Cambridge for their helpful feedback on this article, to Ron Planer for feedback on an early version, and to Peter Hiscock and Amy Tabret for detailed comments on the semi-final version. Thanks to the Australian Research Council for their generous grants in support of my work on the evolution of human social life and its cognitive foundations.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

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Sterelny, K. Artifacts, Symbols, Thoughts. Biol Theory 12, 236–247 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0277-3

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