Evidence for Hominid Predation at Klasies River Mouth, South Africa, and its Implications for the Behaviour of Early Modern Humans (original) (raw)
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An aetiology of hominin behaviour
A rough framework for a first attempt to formulate a preliminary aetiology of hominin behaviour is proposed, based on scientific rather than archaeological evidence and reasoning. Distinctive precursors of modernity in human behaviour were present several million years ago, and since then have become gradually more established. By the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene, modern human cognitive processes seem to have been largely established. However, full modernity of behaviour can only have occurred in recent centuries, and there remain great variations in it even among extant conspecifics. This model differs significantly from all narratives offered by mainstream archaeology, which generally place the advent of modern human behaviour 30 or 40 millennia ago. These notions and the hypotheses they are based on appear to be false, however such behaviour is defined. from the obvious lack of internal falsifiability of most archaeological and many palaeoanthropological propositions. For instance, in perceiving cultural evolution as teleological, archaeology ignores that evolution is fundamentally dysteleological-an example of the incommensurabilities between humanistic and scientific terminologies. Since devolution cannot occur in biology, but can and does occur in culture, the respective meanings of "evolution" differ fundamentally in archaeology and biology. Qualities such as behaviour, cognition, intellect, intention or meaning are not recoverable by archaeology. Moreover, the imposition of modern, literate narratives on properties of incredibly remote societies needs to be questioned (Helvenston, 2013). Lithocentric Pleistocene archaeology cannot even define culture reliably, because taphonomically truncated tool traditions are inert to emic identification, nor should they be expected to differentiate cultures. Rather than characterizing cultures by cultural variables, such as rock art, the discipline has invented tool types (etic constructs or "observer-relative, institutional facts"; sensu Searle, 1995), whose combinations are regarded as diagnostic in identifying cultures. These in turn became the basis of invented ethnic entities such as, for instance, "Mousterians". Obviously the concept of such a discrete society, tribe, language group, nation or ethnicity has no sound logical basis. Of the many limitations to the credibility of the discipline, one more needs to be mentioned here: for much of the last two centuries, all of the most important discoveries in Pleistocene archaeology were presented by non-archaeologists and were without exception rejected for decades-a trend that has continued to this day.
It has often been argued that the success and spread of modern humans $50,000 years ago was due to a series of key behavioral shifts that conferred particular adaptive advantages. And yet, particularly during the African Middle Stone Age (MSA), some of these ''modern'' behaviors see only patchy expression across time and space. Recent models have proposed a link between the emergence of modern behaviors and environmental degradation and/or demographic stress. Under these models, modern behaviors represent a form of social/economic intensification in response to stress; if this were the case, signs of subsistence intensification should be more common during periods in which these behaviors are manifested than when they are not. In order to test these models, I analyzed faunal remains from Sibudu Cave (South Africa), focusing on the Howieson's Poort (HP), a phase in which modern behaviors are evidenced, and the post-HP MSA, when classical signatures of such behavior have disappeared. Significant variability in hunting behavior was identified. While much of this variability appears to correspond with changes in the local environment, evidence for resource stress was more common during the HP. The implications of these results to our understanding of the evolution of human culture are discussed.
The archaeological attributes of behaviour: difference or variability
Endeavour, 1997
Did the Neanderthals evolve into anatomically modern humans, or were they replaced by incoming populations of Homo sapiens sapiens ? This is perhaps the most well-known question debated by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists interested in the period from roughly 250,000 to 30,000 years ago in Eurasia. But while this debate may have attracted most of the media attention, there are other research questions that are at least as worthy of public interest as biological origins.