Tracing the emergence of modern human behavior: Methodological pitfalls and a theoretical path

Abstract

This paper identifies sources of present-day knowledge that may be used as analogues to make inferences about the archaeological record of the emergence of modern human behavior. These sources are modern children's development, ethnography of non-Western societies, biological commonalities among hominids, and behavior of modern nonhuman primates. Given a prior argument that the key to understanding the nature of modern human behavior is the emergence of language (itself claimed as a form of behavior), we identify as a problem the matter of whether language is present or absent in the analogues that may be chosen as sources of knowledge for making inferences about that record. Our own speculative argument about the emergence of modern human behavior stresses the capacity for imitation, the need for sufficient biological capacities, the making of signs whose referential function can be discovered, the transformations in perception and communication that result, and the evolution of these capacities through their selection from the extreme of a range of variation. The interpretation of the archaeological record which this permits does not violate the methodological principles we espouse, although we identify a further methodological problem in how to approach different kinds of visible signs, remaining as traces in that record. We conclude with a brief, further argument about the selective advantage linguistic behavior confers.