Rapid increase in production of symbolic artifacts after 45,000 years ago is not a consequence of taphonomic bias

Kelly, Robert L.; Mackie, Madeline E.; Kandel, Andrew W.

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2023.105885

Journal of Archaeological Science

2023

DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2023.105885

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Rapid increase in production of symbolic artifacts after 45,000 years ago is not a consequence of taphonomic bias

Robert L. Kelly,

Madeline E. Mackie,

Andrew W. Kandel

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2024

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Cited by 2 publications

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The generic Middle Stone Age: fact or fiction?

Will,

Scerri

2024

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

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The generic Middle Stone Age: fact or fiction?

Will,

Scerri

2024

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

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Before The Dawn of Everything

Watts

2022

Hunter Gatherer Research

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The Dawn of Everything ( DoE ) holds that social organisation among our earliest ancestors is likely to have been extraordinarily diverse. Therefore, there can have been no ‘original’ form of human society. ‘Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.’ This does not bode well for integrating evolutionary and social anthropology, but contributions from social anthropology, with its unique perspective on what it is to be a symbolic species, are rare in modern human ‘origins’ research, and so deserve close attention. Following a critique of DoE’ s framing this contribution inverts the premise of extraordinary diversity. The latest archaeological findings and their interpretation suggest pan-African habitual performance of collective ritual, with a uniform signature of red cosmetic usage, from ~160 ka, around the end of speciation, grounding symbolic culture’s first shared fiction(s). DoE marginalised evolutionary theory, the archaeology of our speciation and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. Thereby, it resembles the decried ‘sapient paradox’ and leaves readers clueless as to how the tea-time ‘carnival parade’ of political forms of the last 30,000 years arose. By contrast, African hunter-gatherer ritual use of red substances and associated beliefs suggest an ideology of blood at origin, metaphorically linking women’s reproduction to men’s hunting labour.

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Rapid increase in production of symbolic artifacts after 45,000 years ago is not a consequence of taphonomic bias

Cited by 2 publications

References 43 publications

The generic Middle Stone Age: fact or fiction?

The generic Middle Stone Age: fact or fiction?

Before The Dawn of Everything

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