When did language, culture, consciousness and “modern” human behavior as we perceived it to be, begun? Did it begin 10,000, 30,000, 50,000 or 300,000 years ago? When did it all start? What are the reasons for its emergence? How did it all begin? These are the nagging questions that Cognitive archeology and other disciplines related to the study of man and origins are trying to answer The debate rages on. In the battle of ideas, the war is being fought through words. Warring factions have taken their positions and the camp has been divided into two. The first major faction argues that modern human behavior arose suddenly and nearly simultaneously some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. As to why this happened, proponents of this idea however cannot agree to the cause of this and this camp can be subdivided further. Some believe that this was all caused by a genetic mutation. Other contend that this “Human Revolution,” “Upper Paleolithic Revolution” or what others would like to call as the … [Read more...]
Can studying bonobos and stone knapping modern humans provide us answers to questions on the evolution of modern cognition ?
The highly theoretical nature of the field of Cognitive archeology requires it to use various approaches from different disciplines in order to come up with somewhat reasonable theory as a solution to the problems that it seeks to answer. This is but necessary considering that cognitive archeologist could no longer conduct actual experiments on their subjects as they only rely on the artifacts that has been left behind in order to come up with a reasonable conclusion or theory on the evolution of cognition. Seeking to understand the cognition of evolution, most cognitive archeologist rely heavily on an evolutionary framework and some has drawn inferences from their studies of primates, which is said to be modern man’s distant cousin. The logic of this inference is simple. Since evolutionary theory has proposed that man and primates comes from a common ancestor (Which remains to be discovered and is aptly called “the missing link”) it must therefore be logical to conclude that … [Read more...]