Do early body ornaments prove cognitive modernity? A critical analysis from situated cognition

Garofoli, Duilio

doi:10.1007/s11097-014-9356-0

Cited by 48 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…In conclusion, Botha's evaluation of the "symbolic" hypotheses about Neanderthal language is of great value, given that previous criticisms of such axiomatic thinking have not received adequate attention (Botha, 2009(Botha, , 2010(Botha, , 2012(Botha, , 2015Garofoli, 2014;Garofoli and Iliopoulos, 2019). In fact, chapters three to seven should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in studying Neanderthal behavior, both experts and non-experts.…”

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confidence: 98%

Book review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins

Gabrić¹

2021

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Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of studies and discussions claiming that Neanderthals engaged in a range of “symbolic” behaviors, including personal ornament use (Radovčić et al. 2015), funerary practices (Balzeau et al. 2020), visual arts (Hoffmann et al. 2018), body aesthetics (Roebroeks et al. 2012), etc. In Palaeolithic archaeology, it has become mainstream to axiomatically infer from these putative behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in symbol use and that Neanderthals thus possessed some form of language. Rudolf Botha’s bombastic title Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins provides a detailed and very critical overview of the archaeological hypotheses and speculations about Neanderthal language.

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confidence: 98%

Book review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins

Gabrić¹

2021

Preprint

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“…Consequently, the earliest encounters of our ancestors with shiny shells likely elicited emotional reactions in the finder, who would trigger positively emotional resonance in other band members when raising the shell through the hand to show it to them-as suggested by contemporary accounts of the direct perception of emotionally laden behaviors towards objects (Becchio et al 2008;Ulloa et al 2014). Accordingly, the first discovered shells may have acted as a keystone that integrates the various components of an intersubjective system of embodied emotions (Garofoli 2015a).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…According to a recent alternative approach to early ornamentation (Garofoli 2015a(Garofoli , 2017a, however, the initiation, understanding, and long-term maintenance of these ornaments may be scaffolded by the very material structure of the item, and involve neither meta-representational capacities nor complex forms of mental state attribution. These theorists argue that, when contrasted with the dull pattern of invariance of stones and sand, the relative rarity of shell nacre makes them special.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, these artifacts are likely imbued with arbitrary meanings, and embedded in contexts of mentalistic social norms shared through meta-representations (Garofoli 2015a). However, we argue that these material signs cannot be assimilated to early body ornaments and the other artifacts appearing within the early modern human (and their ancestors') archaeological record.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

Fenici

Garofoli

2017

J Cult Cogn Sci

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According to the thesis of natural mindreading (NMRT), mindreading-i.e., the capacity to attribute mental states to predict and explain behavior-is an intrinsic component of the human biological endowment, thus being innately specified by natural selection within particular neurocognitive structures. In this article, we challenge the NMRT as a phylogenetic and ontogenetic account of the development of the socio-cognitive capacities of our species. In detail, we argue that basic capacities of social cognition (e.g., the traces of early systems of bodily ornamentation within the archeological record, and infants' selective attention at others' beliefs in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) do not involve meta-representational mindreading but are better explained by appealing to situated embodied capacities acquired in social interaction. While we acknowledge that more flexible capacities of social cognition (e.g., those implied by the use of political emblems in industrialized societies, or by 4-year-olds' success in elicitedresponse false belief tasks) involve genuine mindreading, we argue that this ability is elicited and scaffolded by linguistic communication. We conclude that mindreading has emerged as the outcome of a highly derivative long-term constructivist process of biocultural becoming that led to a relatively recent restructuring of the human mind in multiple worldly locations at different times. In particular, we conjecture that humans gradually converged on establishing linguistic practices allowing the understanding of others' actions in terms of mental reasons. These practices were bequeathed to further generations, and continue nowadays to scaffold the acquisition of mindreading in early childhood.

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“…Botha 2009Botha , 2012, and they currently struggle to find support in cognitive science (e.g. Garofoli 2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Impact of the Palaeolithic Toolmaking on the Evolution of Cognition and Language

Gabri¹,

Banda²,

Karavani³

2019

International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research

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Do early body ornaments prove cognitive modernity? A critical analysis from situated cognition

Cited by 48 publications

References 72 publications

Book review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins

Book review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

Impact of the Palaeolithic Toolmaking on the Evolution of Cognition and Language

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