Cognitive Evolution, Population, Transmission, and Material Culture

2014

This paper argues that ritual behavior was a critical selective force in the emergence of modern cognition. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) About 70,000 years before present (ybp) hominins faced an ecological crisis resulting from the massive Toba eruption. (2) Genetic and archeological evidence indicate that some anatomically modern humans (AMH), but no archaic species, arrived at a social solution to this crisis in the form of expanded reciprocal inter-group trade alliances. (3) Increased inter-group interactions put pressure on many hominin social/cognitive abilities, but most critically on ritual behavior. (4) Increasingly sophisticated social rituals arose in order to establish inter-group trust and to ensure intra-group solidarity. (5) Ritual behavior placed demands on attention and working memory, creating a Baldwinian pathway for the emergence of modern cognition by virtue of a modest enhancement of working memory capacity. Evidence for each of these...

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2019

Using a model of cognition as extended and enactive, we examine the role of materiality in making minds as exemplified by lithics and writing, forms associated with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. We address ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause such change, and the spans of time required for neurofunctional reorganization. We also offer three hypotheses for investigating co-influence and change in cognition and material culture. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 785793.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2010

This discussion of archeology of cognition is concerned primarily with the evolutionary emergence of the cognition particular to modern humans but there is an implication for the evolution of cognition among modern humans. Archeological evidence can provide important insights into the evolutionary emergence of human cognition, but theoretical considerations are fundamental in understanding what sorts of cognition there might have been between the ape-like common ancestor and modern humans. Archeology is the only source of evidence for the behavior associated with such theoretical stages. Cognitive archeology, therefore, involves an iterative interaction between theory from outside archeology and more or less direct evidence from the past. This review considers the range of possible evidence from archeology and genetics and summarizes some of the results of analysis of nonhuman primates particularly to assess characteristics of the last common ancestor (LCA) of apes and humans. The history of changes in size and shape of the brain since separation from other apes introduces the need to assess the appropriate cognitive theories to interpret such evidence. The review concentrates on two such approaches: Baddeley's working memory model as interpreted by Coolidge and Wynn, and Barnard's interacting cognitive subsystems as it has been elaborated to define the cognitive conditions for hominins between the LCA and modern people. Most of the rest of the review considers how the evidence from stone tools might be consistent with such theoretical models of cognition. This evidence is consistent with views that modern human behavior only emerged in the last 100,000 years (or so) but it gives an explanation for that in terms of cognition.  understanding the evolution of human cognition. Finally, I assess the most abundant behavioral evidence from the past-stone tools-to shed light on how the theoretical models of cognitive evolution played out in the real world of the past.

Cognitive archaeology has undergone a quiet revolution in the past three to five years. What was once the study of a paltry prehistoric record is now open to the unlimited potential of modern neuroscience. Cognitive archaeology seeks to answer one of the most difficult questions in archaeology: What were these people thinking? In the distant past of the origin of genus Homo, the archaeological record reveals precious little information. The dawn of the modern human mind, perhaps the most important event in the history of life, was shrouded in unsolvable mystery. Until recently we were limited to a very narrow field of inquiry: the symmetry of tools, the spatial organization of sites, the first evidence of symbolism, and the growing complexity of technology. In 1976, Alexander Marshack argued for a very early origin of symbolism in the Mousterian, replete with personal adornment and ritual shamanism. The early origin of symbolism is supported today by Francesco d'Errico and Joao Zilhao, who have provided ample evidence for Neanderthals' and other archaic Homo advanced cognitive abilities, expressed in their symbolic material culture. At the same time, Margarent Conkey began the modern era of Paleolithic art interpretation by critiquing anthropologists' artificial categories. In 2000, McBrearty and Brooks summarized the evolution of human cognition and the history of cognitive archaeology in their article "The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior." Their conclusions align with Marshack's of 25 years earlier, that around 300,000 years ago the modern human mind began to appear in the archaeological record, and that behaviors that were previously limited, by predominant theories in archaeology, to the European 3 Upper Paleolithic were easily visible in the African Middle Stone Age. Determining what 'modern behavior' itself is has been half of the debate.

S. A. de Beaune, F. Coolidge and T. Wynn (dir.), Cognitive Archaeology and Human evolution, 2009

The evolution of the cerebral capacities of humans, from the first hominids to Modern Humans, is at the heart of our interrogations. How can we explain the fact that only hominids seem to have developed the capacity for technical invention, in contrast to our closest relatives the great apes? The archaeological data allow us to observe this phenomenon but offer very little in the way of a response to this question. By examining the possible contributions of other disciplines, particularly in the cognitive and neuropsychological sciences, we can ask if there exists a cause and effect relationship between the following phenomena: - The archaeological data indicate that the technical inventions realized throughout prehistory are increasingly frequent and complex from the first hominids to Modern Humans; - The cognitive perspective seems to indicate that the processes of analogical reasoning are increasingly frequent through time, either for "statistical" reasons (a greater population density leads to a greater probability of the meeting of two ideas), or for cognitive reasons; - Finally, the paleoanthropological data show that current neurological conditions developed progressively with the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex becoming more and more accentuated from the first hominids to Modern Humans. We will explore here the possible contribution resulting from a confrontation of these different disciplines.

Modern humans display a unique degree of social and cognitive complexity. As species we are capable of creating diverse and complex technologies to overcome the limitations of our biology and our external environments. This observed mental uniqueness, has led many researches to coin behavioural and cognitive complexity as the ‘hallmark of humanity’ and ‘behavioural modernity’. Human intelligence has evolved through time and selection, and we as a species owe our current abilities to the evolutionary precursors which came before us. Researchers in the burgeoning field of paleocognition have sought to identify the emergence of our human-like cognition within our hominin lineage through the analysis of the hominin brain size and stone tool technologies produced by extant hominins. Paleocognitive researchers have begun to systematically approach such complex issues as defining human cognition, testing long held assumptions about great ape and human cognitive analogies, and ultimately identifying the evolution of our uniquely human intelligence.

Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene -culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.

2015

Human beings are distinguished from all other organisms by their symbolic way of processing information about the world. This unique cognitive style is qualitatively different from all the earlier hominid cognitive styles, and is not simply an improved version of them. The hominid fossil and archaeological records show clearly that bio-logical and technological innovations have typically been highly sporadic, and totally out of phase, since the inven-tion of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago. They also confirm that this pattern applied in the arrival of modern cognition: the anatomically recognizable species Homo sapiens was well established long before any population of it began to show indications of behaving symbolically. This places the origin of symbolic thought in the realms of exaptation, whereby new structures come into existence before being recruited to new uses, and of emergence, whereby entire new levels of complexity are achieved through new combinations of attribu...

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.