Abstract
The range of evidence at the archaeological site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (GBY) provides a window into the minds of 800,000-year-old Acheulian hominins. Detailed action sequences used in stone tool manufacture, and in the exploitation of animals (over 70 taxa) and plants (over 130 taxa) are reconstructed, suggesting hierarchically organized decision chains with multiple alternative pathways to completion. In terms of complexity and organization, these action sequences rival those of modern hunters and gatherers and are typical of a cognitive strategy known in psychology as expert cognition, or expertise. In the modern world expert cognition drives many of our most esteemed activities, including chess, sport, musical performance, and medical diagnosis. Cognitive models of expertise emphasize the role of retrieval structures, which are chunks of information activated in working memory and linked by association to much larger chunks of information held in long-term memory. The evidence from GBY documents the importance of long-term memory, prospective memory, and cognitive control, and suggests that expert cognition has been an important strategy in hominin cognition for at least 800,000 years.
Highlights
Cognitive models of expertise emphasize the role of retrieval structures, which are chunks of information activated in working memory and linked by association to much larger chunks of information held in long-term memory
The scope and variety of technically enabled hunting and gathering activities evident at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (GBY) appears to have been quite modern. This was not a foraging system that fell mid-way between ape and human foraging. It was indistinguishable in most respects from that practiced by modern hunters and gatherers
The activities evident from the archaeological remains could have been organized via the cognitive resources of expert retrieval structures, including long-term memory, cognitive control, and prospective memory
Summary
The latter is the common substance of archaeological research, and it is only at about 45,000 years ago that fully fledged modern cognition, associated with ornaments, mobile and cave art, have been recognized and attributed to modern humans. The material culture of earlier hominins mostly lacks artistic expressions and is dominated by stone artifacts whose makers are thereby considered by default less evolved (e.g., Herrmann et al, 2007). Stone artifacts are used by archaeologists to study the cognition of ancient hominins, applying a variety of approaches, including comparison to other tool-using primates (Schick et al, 1999), monitoring modern brain activity during knapping (Stout et al, 2000; Hecht et al, 2014) and evaluating the skill, dexterity, and cognitive abilities using psychological models (Herzlinger et al, 2017; Feizi et al, 2018)
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