Unravelling Past Cognition: Approaches Across Disciplines

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.

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.

2010

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...

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 Anatomy, 2008

Since the last common ancestor shared by modern humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, the lineage leading to Homo sapiens has undergone a substantial change in brain size and organization. As a result, modern humans display striking differences from the living apes in the realm of cognition and linguistic expression. In this article, we review the evolutionary changes that occurred in the descent of Homo sapiens by reconstructing the neural and cognitive traits that would have characterized the last common ancestor and comparing these with the modern human condition. The last common ancestor can be reconstructed to have had a brain of approximately 300-400 g that displayed several unique phylogenetic specializations of development, anatomical organization, and biochemical function. These neuroanatomical substrates contributed to the enhancement of behavioral flexibility and social cognition. With this evolutionary history as precursor, the modern human mind may be conceived as a mosaic of traits inherited from a common ancestry with our close relatives, along with the addition of evolutionary specializations within particular domains. These modern human-specific cognitive and linguistic adaptations appear to be correlated with enlargement of the neocortex and related structures. Accompanying this general neocortical expansion, certain higher-order unimodal and multimodal cortical areas have grown disproportionately relative to primary cortical areas. Anatomical and molecular changes have also been identified that might relate to the greater metabolic demand and enhanced synaptic plasticity of modern human brain's. Finally, the unique brain growth trajectory of modern humans has made a significant contribution to our species' cognitive and linguistic abilities.

Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2008

Human beings are unique in their possession of language and symbolic consciousness. Yet there is no doubt that modern Homo sapiens is descendedfrom a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic ancestor. How might this extraordinary transition have occurred? Slow fine-tuning over the eons is not the answer: the apparent steadiness in hominid brain enlargement over the past two myr is probably an artifact of inadequate systematics, while behavioral innovation was highly episodic in human evolution, and nonsynchronic with anatomical innovation. Evidence for expression of symbolic behaviors appears only very late-substantially after Homo sapiens had arrived as an anatomical entity. Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that "exapted" the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be "discovered" culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitionshaving given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for "adaptedness" in modern human behaviors.

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.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

This paper presents 13 hypotheses regarding the specific behavioral abilities that emerged at key milestones during the 600-million-year phylogenetic history from early bilaterians to extant humans. The behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive faculties of humans are complex and varied: we have abilities as diverse as map-based navigation, theory of mind, counterfactual learning, episodic memory, and language. But these faculties, which emerge from the complex human brain, are likely to have evolved from simpler prototypes in the simpler brains of our ancestors. Understanding the order in which behavioral abilities evolved can shed light on how and why our brains evolved. To propose these hypotheses, I review the available data from comparative psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.