FROM CAUSE TO EFFECT

The notion that associates the first cause of hominisation with environmental change, together with a list of the characteristics attributed to humans, form a conceptual skeleton on which the causal explanations are constructed in paleoanthropological scenarios. We shall now attempt to analyse the nature and foundations of those explanations.

If, for example, our authors claim that a hunting economy necessarily implies sexual division of labour, we must ask the following question: why are specialists inclined to consider these two elements to be associated in a sequence in which one of them becomes the effect of the other? It is usual for a scenario to leave the question unanswered, and we must then assume that the author deemed the relation to be sufficiently obvious to need no comment. But it may also happen that the same relation is liberally justified in another text. Thanks to this, parallel analysis of the same sequences over the twenty-four scenarios gives a better understanding of the underlying assumptions which serve as the basis of these causal explanations, since what is tacit in some texts becomes explicit in others.