Tool Production, Joint Attention, and the Emergence of Reflective Self-Awareness

Abstract

Cognitive archaeologists regularly ask: Unlike other tool-using animals and earlier hominins, how did humans, and perhaps Neandertals, acquire reflective awareness of themselves and their agency? This chapter proposes one part of an answer to that question by focusing on a subset of conscious and attentional states, namely, those conscious states that are states of reflective self-awareness and joint attention. It argues that joint attention played an important causal role in the development of reflective self-awareness and that both joint attention and reflective self-awareness probably became sedimented in hominin populations by no later than 100,000 years ago.