On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture

Abstract

Culture is the central concept of anthropology. Its centrality comes from the fact that all branches of the discipline use it, that it is in a way a shorthand for what makes humans unique, and therefore defines anthropology as a separate discipline. In recent years the major contributions to an evolutionary approach to culture have come either from primatologists mapping the range of behaviors, among chimpanzees in particular, that can be referred to as cultural or “proto‐cultural” 1, 2 or from evolutionary theorists who have developed models to account for the pattern and process of human cultural diversification and its impact on human adaptation. 3–5.

Primate origins, human origins, and the end of higher taxa

“…I feel confident that we will eventually find that the basal differences between the human clade and that of our closest living relatives are no greater than those between, say, chimpanzees and bonobos, and that ''the gap between humans and chimpanzees, between a few termites for lunch and Beethoven, is filled with incremental steps.'' 128 As we learn more, we can expect this to prove true of other, higher taxa as well.…”

The Middle Stone Age of the northern Kenyan Rift: age and context of new archaeological sites from the Kapedo Tuffs

“…This forms an essential step towards examining fine-scale geographic variation in the behavior and morphology of Pleistocene African hominin populations that included early representatives of Homo sapiens (cf. Clark, 2002;Foley and Lahr, 2003). Accomplishing this goal requires data at finely resolved spatial and temporal scales and an understanding of the causes, behavioral or otherwise, that define archaeological variation.…”

Neurocranial evolution in modern humans: the case of Jebel Irhoud 1

“…The enlargement of the parietal areas is a discrete and well-expressed trait of the endocranium of H. sapiens (Bruner et al, 2003(Bruner et al, , 2011Bruner, 2004;Neubauer et al, 2009Neubauer et al, , 2010Gunz et al, 2010). Considering the role of the parietal areas in the perception and management of the relationships between inner and outer world (Bruner, 2010a), a two-part model of the evolution of modern humans might also explain some of the differences between early (Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic) and late (Later Stone Age/ Upper Paleolithic) modern human cultures (Klein, 2000(Klein, , 2008Foley and Lahr, 2003;Wynn and Coolidge, 2003;Coolidge and Wynn, 2005). It has been long suggested that morphological and behavioral modernity could have been decoupled along the evolution of H. sapiens and that 'modernity' evolved not as a single package but as a combination of characters evolved in different times and places (Stringer, 2006(Stringer, , 2007Tattersall, 2009).…”