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A Paleolithic Reciprocation Crisis: Symbols, Signals, and Norms

Biological Theory volume 9, pages 65–77 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

Within paleoanthropology, the origin of behavioral modernity is a famous problem. Very large-brained hominins have lived for around half a million years, yet social lives resembling those known from the ethnographic record appeared perhaps 100,000 years ago. Why did it take 400,000 years for humans to start acting like humans? In this article, I argue that part of the solution is a transition in the economic foundations of cooperation from a relatively undemanding form, to one that imposed much more stress on human motivational and cognitive mechanisms. The rich normative, ceremonial, and ideological lives of humans are a response to this economic revolution in forager lives; from one depending on immediate return mutualism to one depending on delayed and third-party reciprocation.

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Notes

  1. Smaller teeth and jaws; a larger brain.

  2. Henry Bunn has argued that organized hunting dates to 1.5 mya or earlier (Bunn 2007; Bunn and Pickering 2010).

  3. Backwell and d’Errico (2008) claim to have evidence of bone tools about 1.5 million years old, but even if they are right, it is striking that bone was so rarely used until around 100 kya.

  4. See, e.g., Heyes (2012), showing the profound effects on human brains of exposure to such social learning tools as scripts and numerals.

  5. Of course more complex hybrid views are possible. But see Hauser (2009) for an admirably explicit bottom-up research program, the aim of which is to specify the forms of human social life made possible by the intrinsic features of human cognition. This debate is often tied to debates about the supposed intrinsic cognitive differences between H. sapiens and Neanderthals, on the grounds that only H. sapiens experienced the transition to behavioral modernity; an increasingly controversial archaeological claim.

  6. Of course, it would still be possible to suggest that the genetic change was necessary but not sufficient for modernity. But this would rob the explanatory strategy of its interest, both because of the lack of a positive case for the idea, and because attention would shift to identifying the extra factors, presumably to do with social complexity.

  7. “I want you to believe that you must behave how we want” (Pettitt 2011a, p. 153).

  8. Arguably, there is genetic data about the size of the population from which living humans descend, and that data shows a latish Pleistocene bottleneck. But the fact (if it is a fact) that we all descend from a human population of about 10,000 that lived about 70 kya does not tell us that there were only 10,000 sapiens living 70 kya.

  9. Not quite all. The frequency with which we find exotic materials, and the distance of materials from their sources, gives us some information about exchange networks.

  10. Or perhaps the adult males: at issue here is whether the male–female division of foraging labor is a sapiens invention, or whether it originated deep in the hominins (O’Connell 2006).

  11. E.g., reproductive cooperation probably dates back to H. erectus-grade hominins, perhaps 1.7 million years, and female support of one another’s reproductive effort comes in many different forms (Hrdy 2009).

  12. As a rough rule of thumb, exotic materials are stone or other materials whose original sources are 50 km or more from the sites at which they are found.

  13. Forager kinship systems are often inclusive, counting everyone in the ethnolinguistic group as kin through some connection, including ones which are entirely fictional, like name-sharing (see, e.g., Lee 1986).

  14. Grave goods are later still; there are no clear examples earlier than 30 kya, so not until after Neanderthals are extinct.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the participants in the “Symbols, Signals and the Archaeological Record” workshop for their comments on both the initial presentation of this material, and to Mary Stiner and Peter Hiscock for their comments on earlier drafts. I am particularly grateful to Peter Hiscock for helping me see the connection between the basic argument of the article and the prehistory of funeral practices, and to Mary Stiner for helping me locate these ideas in response to the archaeological research. Thanks also to the Australian Research Council, whose grant DP130104691 supported this research.

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  1. Philosophy and Tempo and Mode, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kim Sterelny

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Sterelny, K. A Paleolithic Reciprocation Crisis: Symbols, Signals, and Norms. Biol Theory 9, 65–77 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-013-0143-x

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Keywords

  • Behavioral modernity
  • Evolution of norms
  • Forager economics
  • Human cooperation and mutualism
  • Human cooperation and reciprocation
  • Human symbolic behavior