Back to Australopithecus: Utilizing New Theories of Cognition to Understand the Pliocene Hominins

Jeffares, Ben

doi:10.1007/s13752-013-0146-7

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Second, a body constitutes the way it can use opportunities to interact with its environment; the latter changes how cognition unfolds. For example, as Ben Jeffares (2010Jeffares ( , 2013 argues, transforming a body from a predominantly obligate bipedal (think Ardipithecus) to a habitual bipedal like the Australopithecines also changes their cognitive biases. Since there is not much evidence about brain structure and material culture, Australopithecines get much neglected in accounts of cognitive evolution.…”

Section: A New Cognitive Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing things: reconstructing hominin cognitive evolution from the archeological record

Seitz

2023

F1000Res

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Following Pain’s (2021) critical assessment of the prospects of minimal capacity inferences within cognitive archeology based on ‘classical’ cognitive science, I elaborate on the chances of these inferences within so-called embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted (4E) frameworks. Cognitive archeologists infer the cognitive abilities of past hominins from the remains found in the archeological record. Here they face the problem of choosing a theory from the cognitive sciences. Results vary considerably, depending on one’s cognitive theory, so choice matters. Where classical views conceive cognition as mainly involving representations and computing, more recent 4E approaches focus on interactions between environment, body, and brain: hence the same trace, like a stone tool, might require capacities like a mental ‘blueprint’ according to the former, but only environmentally guided perception according to the latter. Given this crucial choice of theory, what are the prospects of 4E then? I present a model of cognitive hominin evolution based on 4E and niche construction theory. Based on this model, I argue that we should be guardedly optimistic: contrary to first impressions, minimal capacity inferences work well within the 4E framework, and adopting 4E might give us a methodological advantage, too.

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Section: A New Cognitive Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing things: reconstructing hominin cognitive evolution from the archeological record

Seitz

2023

F1000Res

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“…Moreover, we needed to structure our daily schedule to ensure we had safe shelter at night, for we could no longer nest safely in trees. All this in a context of much larger range sizes and (probably) early stone technology (Jeffares 2014). Hominin lives became more planned; less driven by immediate response to the contingencies of the here and the now.…”

Section: Beliefs As Displaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A small working party collecting fuel or stone was more likely to carry through a plan than an individual, if only because temptations to be weak-willed were unlikely to be synchronised. The group decision, once made, would be less fragile than an individual one (Jeffares 2010(Jeffares , 2014.…”

Section: Beliefs As Displaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content

Sterelny

2015

Philosophia

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Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage and the support and amplification of those control structures through external resources. Cranes (as Dennett calls them) became increasingly important in the explanation of systematically successful action. These more complex representational engines coevolved with selection to detect and respond to the control structures of others. Since much of that selection was driven by the advantages of cooperation and coordination, in part these control structures were co-opted as external signals and guarantees, in cooperation and coordination. As the time depth of cooperation and co-ordination extended, these public signals of belief and intent acquired secondary functions, as mechanisms to stabilise and structure control systems, making humans not just more transparent to one another at a time, but more predictable over time. Mindshaping, not just mindreading, became increasingly important in our lineage.

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“…Research into human biological and social evolution has attempted to identify the role played by various cognitive aspects (e.g., Donald, 1993;Richerson and Boyd, 2000;van Schaik and Pradhan, 2003;Dunbar and Shultz, 2007;Andersson, 2011;Coolidge, 2011, 2016;Grove, 2012;Jaffers, 2014;Dennett, 2016;Lombard and Gardenfors, 2017). Archaeologists of early prehistory directed their attention to the production and use of stone tools, focusing on planning depth, dexterity, and forms of teaching and learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prehistoric Perspectives on “Others” and “Strangers”

Belfer‐Cohen

Hovers

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Social "connectivity" through time is currently considered as one of the major drivers of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Within this framework, the interactions within and between groups are impacted by individuals' distinction of social relationships. In this paper, we focus on changes in a major aspect of social perceptions, "other" and "stranger." As inferred from the archaeological record, this perception among human groups gained importance during the course of the Pleistocene. These changes would have occurred due to the plasticity of cognitive mechanisms, in response to the demands on behavior along the trajectory of human social evolution. The concepts of "other" and "stranger" have received little attention in the archaeological discourse, yet they are fundamental in the perception of social standing. The property of being an "other" is defined by one's perception and is inherent to one's view of the world around oneself; when shared by a group it becomes a social cognitive construct. Allocating an individual the status of a "stranger" is a socially-defined state that is potentially transient. We hypothesize that, while possibly entrenched in deep evolutionary origins, the latter is a relatively late addition to socio-cognitive categorization, associated with increased sedentism, larger groups and reduced territorial extent as part of the process of Neolithization. We posit that "others" and "strangers" can be approached from contextual archaeological data, with inferences as regards the evolution of cognitive social categories. Our analysis focused on raw material studies, observations on style, and evidence for craft specialization. We find that contrary to the null hypothesis the archaeological record implies earlier emergence of complex sociocognitive categorization. The cognitive, cultural and social processes involved in the maintenance and distinction between "others" and "strangers" can be defined as "self-domestication" that is still an ongoing process.

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Back to Australopithecus: Utilizing New Theories of Cognition to Understand the Pliocene Hominins

Cited by 11 publications

References 46 publications

Doing things: reconstructing hominin cognitive evolution from the archeological record

Doing things: reconstructing hominin cognitive evolution from the archeological record

Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content

Prehistoric Perspectives on “Others” and “Strangers”

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