Abstract
Paleontological evidence suggests that human artefacts with intentional markings might have originated already in the Lower Paleolithic, up to 500.000 years ago and well before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’. These markings apparently did not serve instrumental, tool-like functions, nor do they appear to be forms of figurative art. Instead, they display abstract geometric patterns that potentially testify to an emerging ability of symbol use. In a variation on Ian Hacking’s speculative account of the possible role of “likeness-making” in the evolution of human cognition and language, this essay explores the central role that the embodied processes of making and the collective practices of using such artefacts might have played in early human cognitive evolution. Two paradigmatic findings of Lower Paleolithic artefacts are discussed as tentative evidence of likenesses acting as material scaffolds in the emergence of symbolic reference-making. They might provide the link between basic abilities of mimesis and imitation and the development of modern language and thought.
Highlights
I shall consider a perennial question concerning the human condition: What made our cognitive abilities special in the animal kingdom? Instead of pretending to be able to answer this question, I will engage in some anthropologically informed speculation in the vein of Ian Hacking’s enigmatic “Break: Reals and Representations” chapter in Representing and Intervening (1983)
I will match a variation on his self-confessed “anthropological fiction” against concrete evidence of early human artefacts and offer an interpretation that anchors them in a co-evolutionary framework
The artefacts might have acted as material scaffolds in the development of collective practices of symbolic reference-making from more basic embodied abilities of mimesis and imitation
Summary
I shall consider a perennial question concerning the human condition: What made our cognitive abilities special in the animal kingdom? Instead of pretending to be able to answer this question, I will engage in some anthropologically informed speculation in the vein of Ian Hacking’s enigmatic “Break: Reals and Representations” chapter in Representing and Intervening (1983). In that chapter, Hacking highlights the central role that the making of “likenesses”, by which he refers to forms of
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