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Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem

  • THEMATIC ISSUE ARTICLE: ARCHAEOLOGY AND COGNITIVE EVOLUTION
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Abstract

Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of the material record through that lens. We give examples to show that background theoretical commitments in cognitive science that inform those models lead to different minimum necessary competence results. This raises an important question: what principles should guide us in selecting a model from the cognitive sciences? We outline two complementary responses to this question. The first involves using independent lines of evidence to converge on a particular capacity. This can then influence model choice. The second is a broader suggestion. Theoretical diversity is a good thing in science, but is only beneficial over a limited amount of time. According to recent modelling work, one way of limiting diversity is to introduce extreme priors. We argue that having a broad spectrum of views in the philosophy of cognitive science may actually help cognitive archaeologists address the problem of minimum necessary competence.

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Notes

  1. Of course, it is not the only task of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. But there is a stone tool bias in the material record, and consequently in archaeological discussions.

  2. See also Smith and Wood (2017) and Bolhuis and Wynne (2009). For a general summary (though Currie is an optimist) see Currie (2018, pp. 16–18), and for further discussion see Currie and Killin (2019).

  3. The recent discovery of the even earlier stone tool industry (dated to 3.3 mya, designated the “Lomekwian”) was not published until 2015.

  4. This built on important earlier work by Wynn (1981). McGrew, Wynn, and collaborators have recently expanded this assessment to include some monkeys; in particular capuchins and macaques (McGrew et al. 2019).

  5. As a commentator has pointed out, if one thought that Neanderthals and sapiens were one "larger population," then one could use the preceding line of reasoning to infer Neanderthal symbolic cognition from sapiens evidence. We’re hesitant to endorse the inference (although the conclusion might be right for all that is known) given its antecedent. Although the two could interbreed, the individuals who did are themselves representatives of distinct lineages that diverged half a million years or so before contact and interbreeding in Upper Palaeolithic Europe. The Bronze Agers in our example are not a lineage distinct (at the same level of analysis) from other relevant sapiens populations.

  6. By "placing a constraint" we do not mean advocating the simplest theory per se, which is probably naive anthropomorphism. Morgan himself states that, “the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth” (Morgan 1894, p. 54). Allen-Hermanson (2005) interprets Morgan’s canon as a supervenience claim rather than one about theoretical simplicity, and in our view, this interpretation is plausible. Further analysis is beyond the scope of this article.

  7. Thanks to Colin Klein for discussion here.

  8. This explicit methodological principle appears to be absent from Dennett’s later work on the intentional stance.

  9. See Pain (2019) for further discussion of this example.

  10. Thus on Oldowan toolmaking, Wynn states, “at this point in hominid evolution it appears to have been merely a variant on the basic ape adaptive pattern, with no obvious leap in intellectual ability required” (2002, p. 394).

  11. Other views are possible too. An anonymous referee points out that Garofoli (2019), for example, does not deny intentionality and operational planning to ancient hominins yet acknowledges the importance of embodied meaning allegedly inherent in the stone tools themselves.

  12. As Alison Wylie has long argued, archaeology is a “trading zone” (Wylie 1999, 2000; Chapman and Wylie 2016). It comprises practitioners with expertise in diverse approaches and methods who draw lines of evidence from different nearby fields, requiring integration. For a recent discussion concerning the case of archaeogenetics, see Downes (2019).

  13. Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki voyage, then, succeeded in demonstrating capacity, but failed in its projection. See Novick et al. (2020) for discussion.

  14. We are speaking loosely here. As an anonymous referee points out, these endeavors were to refine frames of reference for characterizing variation, not test how something might have been done in the past. Here we are reframing general observations/outcomes for our purposes.

  15. It may be a possible competent cause but we suspect it will fail projection (as did the Kon-Tiki hypothesis) not least for the issues extant apes face with knapping even in the most favorable of learning environments.

  16. However, while the brain studies of living humans might not be direct evidence relevant to projection, the failure of apes is direct evidence: it is evidence that the standard range of variation of ape cognition is not enough to produce Oldowan, let alone Acheulean, tools. Hence our skepticism.

  17. FlipTest is a computer program for measuring how symmetrical two halves of an electronic image are, producing numerical values of overall asymmetry in pixels (Hardaker and Dunn 2005).

  18. See Wynn (2016, pp. 8–10), for retrospective discussion of his Piagetian days.

  19. This is just one example from the burgeoning field of social epistemology of science. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a full review; see, e.g., Zollman (2013) and Muldoon (2013).

  20. Rosenstock et al. (2017) criticise Zollman (2010), showing his results are sound but only in a smaller proportion of parameter space than he initially claimed. But these criticisms do not detract from the take-home messages presented here—not least because cognitive archaeology satisfies Rosenstock et al.’s conditions for a “difficult” inquiry: there are (relatively) few practitioners; (relatively) small batches of information are acquired at any given time; differences stemming from competing midrange theories are often (relatively) minor or difficult to test. It is not our intention to weigh in further on such debates here.

  21. Again, this is not the place to adjudicate between rival approaches or determine which approaches are plausible. The point is a coarse-grained methodological one.

  22. Indeed, as an anonymous reviewer points out, this diversity would encompass current debates between proponents of the extended evolutionary synthesis and those advocating the standard evolutionary theory (Laland 2014). We agree that working through this line of thought is important, but is beyond the scope of the current article.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to participants of ANU’s Material Evidence and Cognitive Evolution conference, ANU’s philosophy of mind and cognitive science reading group, the “ArchaeologyWorks” 2020 Zoom workshop (University of Exeter)—and AK thanks participants of ARPA 2019 (Cape Breton University)—for fruitful discussion of themes herein. In addition, this article benefited enormously from comments on earlier versions from Kim Sterelny, Colin Klein, and two anonymous reviewers.

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

    Anton Killin & Ross Pain

  2. ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia

    Anton Killin

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Killin, A., Pain, R. Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem. Biol Theory 18, 269–283 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00378-7

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