Symbols, Signals, and the Archaeological Record

Abstract

Human social life is very different from that of great apes in many important ways. One is scale: humans now mostly live in enormous social worlds, with specialization and a transformed economic base. But even before our social worlds became so large, they depended on technology, technique, and coordinated cooperation. Great apes are extractive foragers; humans are cooperative extractive foragers, employing and relying on physical and informational resources that have been built over generations (Foley and Lahr 2003; Sterelny 2007; Foley and Gamble 2009). Importantly, the internal lives of human groups are very unlike those of apes. Humans are not just members of groups; they are aware of, and identify with, the groups of which they are a part. And these identities encourage and constrain the behaviors and ideologies of individuals. Like football supporters, humans often advertise these memberships in distinctive styles of dress, language, and behavior (Henshilwood and Marean 2003; Henshilwood and d’Errico 2011). In this way humans invest considerable effort in activities that may appear to be neither functional nor pleasant: erecting monuments, mutilating their bodies and those of their children, avoiding available resources, sacrificing resources in elaborately coordinated displays, and investing labor and material to maintain social connections with the dead. Social life within human groups is structured not merely by regular patterns of action and interaction but by explicit, acknowledged, or if implicit at least apparent, norms. Norms are not always respected, but they help make others’ behavior predictable enough for planning, coordination, and investment in the future, and so departures from these expectations are subject to formal and informal sanction and coercion (Ross 2006, 2008). In short, humans live in symbolically marked worlds, operating within limits constructed by normatively structured groups. How and why did this form of social life begin? One idea is that the answer is revealed in changes in the African archaeological record that began about 100 kya (though smeared in space and time); changes that have been labeled the origins of behavioral modernity (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Henshilwood and Marean 2003). At about this time, archaeologists claim to recognize an increase in artifact diversity, regional differentiation, expansion of the human range, and a diversification of the habitats and resources humans exploited. Moreover, and of especial importance in this context, dedicated ‘‘material symbols’’ become a highly visible part of the archaeological record. Most archaeologists have read this pattern as showing that before about 100 kya there are no unequivocal signs that hominins lived an ideological life, and no evidence their social interactions were mediated by artificial objects that were signs of identity, social role, status, or authority. The claim is that before this time, there were no cave paintings, statues, or figurines; no jewelry; no musical instruments; no utilitarian objects that are incised and decorated; no burials with grave goods; no sites made or modified for ritual activities. Of course, much of the physical record is lost, and many of these products (cave art, for example) would be especially vulnerable, even if K. Sterelny (&) Philosophy and Tempo and Mode, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: kim.sterelny@anu.edu.au