Abstract

Many scholars have sought to relate the findings and interpretations of archaeology to the evolution of the brain and mind. In effect, such studies venture a statement that the techniques and symbols explicit and implicit in the archaeological record are related, more or less directly, to the cognitive abilities, mental competences and intelligences of evolving hominins, ancient and modern. It has however been evident for some time that it is not only from the archaeological record that we may glean evidence on the evolution of hominin intelligence. The size and form of endocranial casts of fossil hominins have added grist to the mill of those probing the evolution of hominin cerebration. The analogy and in a hopeful mood the homology between the brains and behaviours of human and non-human primates, and those inferred for our remote ancestors, have provided new pointers in the analysis of culture. Indeed they question the validity of the very concept of culture, as understood during most of the twentieth century. Ethological studies have shown some close resemblances between human and ape behaviours. Just over fifty years ago, the apparently human preserve of tool-using and tool-making led Kenneth Oakley to speak of Man the Tool-Maker, while he could write ‘… it is evident that man may be distinguished as the tool-making primate …’. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, Jane Goodall, Frédéric Joulian, William McGrew and C. and H. Boesch cast a flood of new light on the implemental activities of wild chimpanzees, just as H. Khroustov, in Moscow, did for chimpanzees in captivity in the early 1960s. Joulian went on to contest the longcherished paradigm that ‘culture’ is an exclusively human realm. The pursuit by various groups of West African chimpanzees of nut-cracking in some populations, but not in others of the same species, strongly suggested that such behavioural traits were transmitted by epigenetic means. In a word, they were learned behaviour of a kind which, conventionally, has been assigned to human cultural behaviour. Based on our analysis of H. habilis endocasts and on a review of the inferred cultural and social aspects of this hominin, it is argued here that H. habilis was able to speak.

Résumé

Nombre de scientifiques ont cherché à rattacher découvertes et interprétations archéologiques à l’évolution du cerveau et de l'intellect.