Fiona Coward

Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of the mind

New developments in neuroimaging have demonstrated that the basic capacities underpinning human social skills are shared by our closest extant primate relatives. The challenge for archaeologists is to explain how complex human societies evolved from this shared pattern of face-to-face social interaction. We argue that a key process was the gradual incorporation of material culture into social networks over the course of hominin evolution. Here we use three long-term processes in hominin evolution—encephalization, the global human diaspora and sedentism/agriculture—to illustrate how the cultural transmission of material culture allowed the ‘scaling up’ of face-to-face social interactions to the global societies known today. We conclude that future research by neuroimagers and archaeologists will need to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind human engagement with material culture as well as other persons.

From Individual Neurons to Social Brains

The manufacture of stone tools is an integral part of the human evolutionary trajectory. However, very little research is directed towards the social and cognitive context of the process of manufacture. This article aims to redress this balance by using insights from contemporary neuroscience. Addressing successively more inclusive levels of analysis, we will argue that the relevant unit of analysis when examining the interface between archaeology and neuroscience is not the individual neuron, nor even necessarily the individual brain, but instead the socio-cognitive context in which brains develop and tools are manufactured and used. This context is inextricably linked to the development of unique ontogenetic scheduling, as evidenced by the fossil record of evolving hominin lineages.

Settlement, society and cognition in human evolution : landscapes in mind

This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behaviour as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environment and its perception and habitation by active agents. This international group of contributors presents theoretically informed yet empirically based perspectives on hominin and human landscapes. Includes 17 contributions by both well-known and up-and-coming scholars of the Palaeolithic and human evolution Recognises, celebrates and builds on the contributions made by Clive Gamble to the study of the Palaeolithic Challenges common assumption that early hominin culture and behaviour was dictated solely by the environment, thus restoring the role of agency in the discussion of early hominin evolution

Estimating population size, density and dynamics of Pre-Pottery Neolithic villages in the central and southern Levant: an analysis of Beidha, southern Jordan

An understanding of population dynamics is essential for reconstructing the trajectories of central and southern Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) villages. The aim of this investigation was to derive more empirically and statistically robust absolute demographic data than currently exists. Several methodologies were explored, including those based on dwelling unit size and the number of dwellings; residential floor area per person; population density; and allometric growth formulae. The newly established storage provisions formulae based on the affordance of sleeping individuals within structures was found to be the most viable method. Estimates were adjusted to reflect potential structural contemporaneity calculated from building use-life and phase length estimates based on archaeological, ethnographic and experimental research, and Bayesian chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates. The application of methodologies to the PPNB site of Beidha in southern Jordan is presented. The analysis highlights inconsistencies with current theory relating to population density at Beidha. In particular, the results suggest that nuclear families probably did not form the predominant dwelling unit type during Subphases A2 and B2. In addition, population density was estimated at anywhere between 350 and 900 people per ha. This range far exceeds the ethnographically derived density values commonly utilized for reconstructing PPN village populations (c. 90 to 294 people per ha).

What use is the Palaeolithic in promoting new prehistoric narratives

Imagine a situation in which the world and the universe are as old as we know them to be, but in which people came into being in 4004 BC. Let us think for a minute about what implications such a scenario would have for our notions of the historical process. However people came to be (and we might have to invoke some form of divine intervention for such a sudden appearance), it is likely that people would be disengaged from the physical and causal processes of the rest of the universe. With our biological ties severed and the work of Darwin undone for the human realm, culture and human exceptionalism would inevitably loom large. Humans could not be seen as emerging through an evolutionary process in tandem with other organisms, nor would we be linked to the broader history of the universe through the operation of physical or chemical processes as normally understood. The radical discontinuity between people and everything else would require a special explanatory framework for humans. This might in turn lead to a division of knowledge, in some parts of the world at least, between those who study the social, cultural, philosophical, anthropological and historical aspects of people and those interested in the physical and biological worlds. No reputable humanities scholar or social scientist believes that people are 6004 years old. But many act as if this were the case, so that the last few thousand years are when people became interestingly human, started farming for a living, dwelling in cities and commenced mass production and consumption. The rest is history: mass-consuming urbanites demonstrating culture at a level not glimpsed in any other species, the origins of which lie in a control of natural resources from which we are set apart. It is as if the Palaeolithic never happened.