Deep structure in the Acheulean adaptation: technology, sociality and aesthetic emergence

Abstract

This article considers the adaptive setting and probable origins of human aesthetic capabilities, using evidence of the Acheulean tradition in the last million years, and highlighting the importance of the preceding and enveloping social and technological contexts. Acheulean bifaces, made from about 1.75 to 0.1 Ma, often with an appearance of symmetry, give windows on crucial interlocking aspects of human intellectual evolution. These have been seen as the domains of technology, sociality and aesthetics, following Leroi-Gourhan, or in near-equivalence the ‘technological’, ‘sociological’ and ‘ideological/philosophical’ of L.A. White. These domains can be analysed to have a reality, in the sense that social worlds of the apes far antedate technology, which in turn is generally taken to be far older than a sense of aesthetic appreciation. The bifaces are helpful in illustrating early developments because they can be made only through bringing together a set of concepts linking form, function and technology of manufacture, in a recurring ‘deep structure’. As there are at least 6 to 12 necessary concepts, perhaps significantly more, the artefacts are essentially multivariable or multivariate. They thus impose high cognitive requirements in manufacture, pressing towards effective sequencing of steps so that not too many variables will be involved simultaneously. Support of such a knowledge base has social requirements of shared or collective intention. Biomechanical and functional necessities also exert pressures on concepts: rules maintained by all these requirements entail a notion of ‘appropriateness’ or ‘rightness’ that may have been a prime factor in driving evolution of a sense of aesthetics and even the shaping of moral feelings. As the rules are variably expressed through time and space in the Acheulean, some of the best information comes from seeing how far particular variables are ‘locked’ in relationships which recur to give the impression of deep structure.