Biology and Behaviour in Human Evolution

Current Anthropology, 2011

A rough framework for a first attempt to formulate a preliminary aetiology of hominin behaviour is proposed, based on scientific rather than archaeological evidence and reasoning. Distinctive precursors of modernity in human behaviour were present several million years ago, and since then have become gradually more established. By the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene, modern human cognitive processes seem to have been largely established. However, full modernity of behaviour can only have occurred in recent centuries, and there remain great variations in it even among extant conspecifics. This model differs significantly from all narratives offered by mainstream archaeology, which generally place the advent of modern human behaviour 30 or 40 millennia ago. These notions and the hypotheses they are based on appear to be false, however such behaviour is defined. from the obvious lack of internal falsifiability of most archaeological and many palaeoanthropological propositions. For instance, in perceiving cultural evolution as teleological, archaeology ignores that evolution is fundamentally dysteleological-an example of the incommensurabilities between humanistic and scientific terminologies. Since devolution cannot occur in biology, but can and does occur in culture, the respective meanings of "evolution" differ fundamentally in archaeology and biology. Qualities such as behaviour, cognition, intellect, intention or meaning are not recoverable by archaeology. Moreover, the imposition of modern, literate narratives on properties of incredibly remote societies needs to be questioned (Helvenston, 2013). Lithocentric Pleistocene archaeology cannot even define culture reliably, because taphonomically truncated tool traditions are inert to emic identification, nor should they be expected to differentiate cultures. Rather than characterizing cultures by cultural variables, such as rock art, the discipline has invented tool types (etic constructs or "observer-relative, institutional facts"; sensu Searle, 1995), whose combinations are regarded as diagnostic in identifying cultures. These in turn became the basis of invented ethnic entities such as, for instance, "Mousterians". Obviously the concept of such a discrete society, tribe, language group, nation or ethnicity has no sound logical basis. Of the many limitations to the credibility of the discipline, one more needs to be mentioned here: for much of the last two centuries, all of the most important discoveries in Pleistocene archaeology were presented by non-archaeologists and were without exception rejected for decades-a trend that has continued to this day.

Endeavour, 1997

Did the Neanderthals evolve into anatomically modern humans, or were they replaced by incoming populations of Homo sapiens sapiens ? This is perhaps the most well-known question debated by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists interested in the period from roughly 250,000 to 30,000 years ago in Eurasia. But while this debate may have attracted most of the media attention, there are other research questions that are at least as worthy of public interest as biological origins.

The modern biological model of (human) evolution is that of a branching tree. By contrast, prevailing models for human cognitive evolution remain unilinear in character, representing a ladder. The linear ladder model is the result of the opposition of an ethnographic and a primate reference frame for cognition, representing the two ends of what by definition becomes a linear line of evolution. It forces all types of behaviour that are not considered fully “modern” to assume a position at a lower level of cognition. Thelinear model is in addition pushed by the (flawed) perception of a linear encephalizationtrend over time.The structure of this linear model isnot fundamentally based in either modern evolutionary theory or the archaeological record. The model itself is even structurally immune to constraints from pertinent data.Adopting a branching tree model instead has serious implications for views on hominin cognition and particularly the meaning of being “behaviourally modern”. In a branching model, “modern behaviour” no longer has a unique status as being by necessity the most sophisticated level of cognition, turning many of the traditional implications derived from the possession of“modern behaviour”moot.The challenge that adoption of a branching tree model creates is that ways have to be devised to account for unique cognitive expressions that are not covered by the existing framework of ethnography and primatology. In addition, notions about the “superiority” of “modern behaviour” over other forms of cognitive expression have to be abandoned.The advantage is that the model is structured to pertinent archaeological data and actually testable with archaeological data.Two case studies from the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Europe probe the construction of unique models for mobility strategies “bottom up”from archaeological data, providing a unique alternative to mobility modelsand their cognitive implications as derived from “bottom down” application of an ethno-primatological framework.

Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, 2021

Archaeology's main contribution to the debate over the origins of modern humans has been investigating where and when modern human behavior is first recognized in the archaeological record. Most of this debate has been over the empirical record for the appearance and distribution of a set of traits that have come to be accepted as indicators of behavioral modernity. This debate has resulted in a series of competing models that we explicate here, and the traits are typically used as the test implications for these models. However, adequate tests of hypotheses and models rest on robust test implications, and we argue here that the current set of test implications suffers from three main problems:

Current Anthropology, 2011

2015

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2008

This review begins with a brief outline of the key concepts of Darwinian archaeology. Its history is then summarized, beginning with its emergence as a significant theoretical focus within the discipline in the early 1980s; its main present-day currents are then presented, citing examples of recent work. The developments in archaeology are part of broader trends in anthropology and psychology and are characterized by the same theoretical disagreements. There are two distinct research traditions: one centered on cultural transmission and dual inheritance theory and the other on human behavioral ecology. The development of specifically archaeological methodologies within these two traditions for testing evolutionary hypotheses relating to diachronic questions using archaeological data is discussed. Finally, this review suggests that the greatest challenge for the future lies in finding ways of using archaeological data to address current major debates in evolutionary social science as a whole concerning, for example, the emergence of largescale cooperation.

In: E. Bruner (ed.), Human Paleoneurology, 2014

The discipline of Paleoneurology goes beyond the determination of biological characteristics and morphologies; it can also be used to infer behaviour in extinct species. In Paleocognition, the cognitive capacities of extinct humans can be examined through their fossil remains and the tools they left behind. This chapter examines some inferences that can be made about the origins of language based on paleoneurological and archaeological evidence. It focuses on laterality as a case study for the many behaviours that can be inferred from archaeology, and which are relevant to the origins and evolution of language. First is a review of the ontogeny of human hand preference, handedness in humans, and the hand preferences of non-human apes. Human handedness begins before birth, and develops into adulthood. All human populations have a majority of right-handers; explanations for the maintenance of a minority of left-handers are discussed. Next, the data for hand preferences and asymmetries in extinct fossil hominins are summarised. These show that species-level right-handedness has existed since Homo heidelbergensis, but there is only evidence for left-handed minorities in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Finally, links between language, hand skill, ancient stone tool-making, and other cultural behaviours are discussed to propose a tentative date for the origins of language.