Abstract
Indigenous hunter-gatherers view the world differently than do WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies. They depend—as in prehistoric times—on intimate relationships with elements such as animals, plants and stones for their successful adaptation and prosperity. The desire to maintain the perceived world-order and ensure the continued availability of whatever is necessary for human existence and well-being thus compelled equal efforts to please these other-than-human counterparts. Relationships of consumption and appreciation characterized human nature as early as the Lower Palaeolithic; the archaeological record reflects such ontological and cosmological conceptions to some extent. Central to my argument are elephants and handaxes, the two pre-eminent Lower Palaeolithic hallmarks of the Old World. I argue that proboscideans had a dual dietary and cosmological significance for early humans during Lower Paleolithic times. The persistent production and use of the ultimate megaherbivore processing tool, the handaxe, coupled with the conspicuous presence of handaxes made of elephant bones, serve as silent testimony for the elephant–handaxe ontological nexus. I will suggest that material culture is a product of people's relationships with the world. Early humans thus tailored their tool kits to the consumption and appreciation of specific animal taxa: in our case, the elephant in the handaxe.
Highlights
Today a thriving human lineage occupies every continent, whereas the elephant lineage, comprising some of the largest mammals that ever walked on Earth, is endangered and geographically restricted to regions of Africa and Asia. (‘Elephant’ refers to all members of the Proboscidea taxonomic order, extant and extinct)
The rest of Asia and America, this interaction ended at the terminal Pleistocene, with the extinction of proboscideans
In specific regions in Africa and the Levant, the disappearance of elephants seems to have occurred during the Middle Pleistocene and was linked to significant cultural and technological transformations in human behaviour and adaptation strategies (Barkai et al 2017; Ben-Dor et al 2011; Blasco et al 2019a,b; Potts et al 2018)
Summary
Indigenous hunter-gatherers view the world differently than do WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies. They depend—as in prehistoric times—on intimate relationships with elements such as animals, plants and stones for their successful adaptation and prosperity. Relationships of consumption and appreciation characterized human nature as early as the Lower Palaeolithic; the archaeological record reflects such ontological and cosmological conceptions to some extent. Humans tailored their tool kits to the consumption and appreciation of specific animal taxa: in our case, the elephant in the handaxe. A landscape of streams and lakes, mountains and rich valleys, shared by thousands of species of plants and animals, is understood through the lens of the western materialist worldview as a wealth of ecosystem services or natural resources. Through the lens of traditional Indigenous philosophy the living world is understood, not as a collection of exploitable resources, but as a set of relationships and responsibilities
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