A pervasive question not only in Cognitive Archeology but also in all sciences using the evolutionary framework is this, when and how did the evolution of cognition take place? This has been the crux of the debate that has been raging since the early beginnings of the discipline.
School of thoughts on this matter can be divided into two camps. The first school of thought is where environmental factors are the cause of behavioral and biological evolution, which ultimately leads to cognitive evolution while the second school of thought argues that autocatalytic changes were the major cause of cognitive evolution.
Considering the position of the two camps, answering the when and how of the evolution of cognition would be akin to the chicken and egg question. Did environmental factors cause the evolution of cognition or did autocatalytic changes began in the mind and that response to environmental factors merely reflect that which began in the mind already.
Such issues are direct directly and indirectly addressed by two articles written by the turn of the 20th century. In March 2001 Stanley Ambrose of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Illinois published the article “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution” while sometime in 2002 Thomas Wynn from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, who has been publishing extensively on cognitive archeology for decades now, wrote the article “Archeology and Cognitive Evolution.”
Both authors take into consideration that challenges brought about by environmental factors had probably had an influence on behavior and biological evolution. However both tried to answer the question in different ways.
Stanley Ambrose summarizes the details of the finds and analysis for the past decades with regards to stone tools and how these might give us a clue as to the cause of the evolution of cognition. From a discussion of the chain repertoire to discussing sourcing such as the distances of raw materials and a discussion on the details and complexities of the stone tools itself and putting their creation in the context of the ecological model, Ambrose tries to find an appropriate hypothesis that might explain the evolution of cognition. While his conclusion weighs heavily on the challenges posed by the increasingly variable severe and risky environments, which influenced behavior and biological evolution, he nevertheless did not close the possibility that changes may also be possibly mainly autocatalytic driven by language and by cultural systems of knowledge and understanding of nature and society.
On the other hand while compared to his pervious masterpiece on the using the Piagetian perspective in the interpretation of stone tools, Thomas Wynn did not limit himself to the interpretation of stone tools through the confines of the development of the mind itself. This time, in his 2002 article Thomas Wynn now opened himself to the possibility that environmental factors, although not solely, might have helped triggered evolution in cognition.
Compared to Ambrose however, Thomas Wynn is more detailed in his hypothesis. He not only tried to provide an answer to the pervasive question that has dodged all sciences within the evolutionary framework for decades or even centuries. Wynn has tried to answer not only the “how” of cognitive evolution but also the “when” and even tries to answer the question “what.” His theory is that there was two times in which significant developments in hominid cognition might have occurred. The first was about 1.5 million years ago. The said evolutionary development of that time is associated with Homo Erectus. Wynn suggested that cognitive developments during this time were the imposition on the shapes of artifacts, the coordination of shape recognition (symmetry) and spatial thinking (stone knapping).
The second episode is hypothesized to have occurred a million years later. The evolutionary development of this time was the shift from Homo erectus to archaic Homo Sapiens. This was the time of the appearance of large mammal hunting in the contemporary archeological record. According to Wynn, this might have selected for the evolution of cognition particularly aspect of spatial cognition through, either by way of projectile use or navigation.
Thomas Wynn concludes that archeology may be able to point to the time and context of cognitive evolution but cannot itself illuminate the workings of the human minds. He stresses that a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary approach to cognitive evolution is necessary to do this.
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