Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Profile of Professor Tobias
- List of participants
- Foreword
- Address
- Keynote address
- Searching for common ground in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and genetics
- The history of a special relationship: prehistoric terminology and lithic technology between the French and South African research traditions
- Essential attributes of any technologically competent animal
- Significant tools and signifying monkeys: the question of body techniques and elementary actions on matter among apes and early hominids
- Tools and brains: which came first?
- Environmental changes and hominid evolution: what the vegetation tells us
- Implications of the presence of African ape-like teeth in the Miocene of Kenya
- Dawn of hominids: understanding the ape-hominid dichotomy
- The impact of new excavations from the Cradle of Humankind on our understanding of the evolution of hominins and their cultures
- Stone Age signatures in northernmost South Africa: early archaeology in the Mapungubwe National Park and vicinity
- Vertebral column, bipedalism and freedom of the hands
- Characterising early Homo: cladistic, morphological and metrical analyses of the original Plio-Pleistocene specimens
- Early Homo, ‘robust’ australopithecines and stone tools at Kromdraai, South Africa
- The origin of bone tool technology and the identification of early hominid cultural traditions
- Contribution of genetics to the study of human origins 276
- An overview of the patterns of behavioural change in Africa and Eurasia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene
- From the tropics to the colder climates: contrasting faunal exploitation adaptations of modern humans and Neanderthals
- New neighbours: interaction and image-making during the West European Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition
- Late Mousterian lithic technology: its implications for the pace of the emergence of behavioural modernity and the relationship between behavioural modernity and biological modernity
- Exploring and quantifying technological differences between the MSA I, MSA II and Howieson's Poort at Klasies River
- Stratigraphic integrity of the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave
- Testing and demonstrating the stratigraphic integrity of artefacts from MSA deposits at Blombos Cave, South Africa
- From tool to symbol: the behavioural context of intentionally marked ostrich eggshell from Diepkloof, Western Cape
- Chronology of the Howieson's Poort and Still Bay techno-complexes: assessment and new data from luminescence
- Subsistence strategies in the Middle Stone Age at Sibudu Cave: the microscopic evidence from stone tool residues
- Speaking with beads: the evolutionary significance of personal ornaments
- Personal names index
- Subject index
Tools and brains: which came first?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Profile of Professor Tobias
- List of participants
- Foreword
- Address
- Keynote address
- Searching for common ground in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and genetics
- The history of a special relationship: prehistoric terminology and lithic technology between the French and South African research traditions
- Essential attributes of any technologically competent animal
- Significant tools and signifying monkeys: the question of body techniques and elementary actions on matter among apes and early hominids
- Tools and brains: which came first?
- Environmental changes and hominid evolution: what the vegetation tells us
- Implications of the presence of African ape-like teeth in the Miocene of Kenya
- Dawn of hominids: understanding the ape-hominid dichotomy
- The impact of new excavations from the Cradle of Humankind on our understanding of the evolution of hominins and their cultures
- Stone Age signatures in northernmost South Africa: early archaeology in the Mapungubwe National Park and vicinity
- Vertebral column, bipedalism and freedom of the hands
- Characterising early Homo: cladistic, morphological and metrical analyses of the original Plio-Pleistocene specimens
- Early Homo, ‘robust’ australopithecines and stone tools at Kromdraai, South Africa
- The origin of bone tool technology and the identification of early hominid cultural traditions
- Contribution of genetics to the study of human origins 276
- An overview of the patterns of behavioural change in Africa and Eurasia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene
- From the tropics to the colder climates: contrasting faunal exploitation adaptations of modern humans and Neanderthals
- New neighbours: interaction and image-making during the West European Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition
- Late Mousterian lithic technology: its implications for the pace of the emergence of behavioural modernity and the relationship between behavioural modernity and biological modernity
- Exploring and quantifying technological differences between the MSA I, MSA II and Howieson's Poort at Klasies River
- Stratigraphic integrity of the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave
- Testing and demonstrating the stratigraphic integrity of artefacts from MSA deposits at Blombos Cave, South Africa
- From tool to symbol: the behavioural context of intentionally marked ostrich eggshell from Diepkloof, Western Cape
- Chronology of the Howieson's Poort and Still Bay techno-complexes: assessment and new data from luminescence
- Subsistence strategies in the Middle Stone Age at Sibudu Cave: the microscopic evidence from stone tool residues
- Speaking with beads: the evolutionary significance of personal ornaments
- Personal names index
- Subject index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- From Tools to SymbolsFrom Early Hominids to Modern Humans, pp. 82 - 102Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2005