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Compte rendu de : A. Nowell et I. Davidson (eds), Stone
Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition, University
Press of Colorado, 2010.
Sophie A. de Beaune
To cite this version:
Sophie A. de Beaune. Compte rendu de : A. Nowell et I. Davidson (eds), Stone Tools and the Evolution
of Human Cognition, University Press of Colorado, 2010.. 2011, pp.143-145. �halshs-00730328�
Reviews
can be dividual i e they can be divided and the parts still retain the totality and power of the totality of the person
As persons then cemies Taíno numinous force o en represented as idols and people can establish complex relationships similar to those between human beings In the case of the chiefs or caciques for example their relationship with their cemies is not a simple one where the all powerful supernatural entity favours the leader It consists of a com plex interaction where the power of the cemi is in uenced by the political and social abilities of the cacique and the social and political standing of the cacique is in uenced by the power of the cemi Therefore the matching between cacique and cemi has to be on equal terms or with symmetry of power since as Oliver explains the cemies reputation as e ective agents is not necessarily isomorphic with that of their human partner Pairing potent cemies with powerful humans was the most e ective combination
On the basis of these principles of the Taíno world view Oliver extends his interpretations to the rest of the webs of interactions spun by caciques and cemies through the use of meaningful objects and actions Thus the rest of the book focuses on interpreting a long list of cultural social and historical phenomena observed in both the eth nohistoric and archaeological record The phenomena from the ethnohistoric record include the stealing and gi giving of cemies the tradition of exchanging names the meaning of stories about cemies ba le strategies and the syncretic use of Catholic imagery as cemies by native caciques The archaeological phenomena include the di erential distribu tions of several types of cemies throughout the Caribbean archipelago e g three pointers masks or guayzas stone collars and elbow stones and what was their role on the formation of alliances and wife exchange between polities within and between islands
Summarizing as mentioned above while in principle archaeology continues to believe in the importance of the holistic perspective in practice it has dri ed away from it by emphasizing mostly general or generic questions and their answers A good example of this is the studies on the development of social strati cation and the internal dynamics of hierarchies and centralized power Although the last few decades have seen great strides in the modelling of these societies many of the approaches tend to have a materialist or political economy perspective emphasizing the relationship between politics economy and ideology from a macro level using concepts such as wealth and staple nances and ideological control Moreover modelling is done almost exclusively from the perspective of the elite Arguments such as wealth nances and control of ideology ritual and symbolism were manipulated by the elite to centralize of power and secure their position in society are stated without a full understanding of the economic system at a lower level and the cosmovision of the group Few are the studies for example that take into consideration the speci cs of their religious world view or for that e ect if the elite actually believed what they preached
In general I nd two weaknesses with the book The rst is that it tries to cover too much in one essay making it a bit overwhelming for the reader and on some occasions
repetitive The second is that in several instances especially in dealing with speci c events or people mentioned in the Chronicles the discussion in my opinion became somewhat speculative e g that a cacique from Hispaniola is probably related to one in Puerto Rico because they share the same name
Nevertheless this book is a refreshing new perspective that does not concentrate on developing general models but on explanations that are adapted more to the particular case By combining concepts and ideas from semiotics symbolic economic and political anthropology with the idiosyncrasies of Caribbean culture Oliver is able to generate a complex and realistic explanatory mode where all human actions are measured with a native yardstick Not from a western academic tradition but from the Taíno world view And this in my opinion is a holistic explanation
L Antonio Curet The Field Museum S Lake Shore Drive Chicago IL
USA Email acuret eldmuseum org
Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition
edited by April Nowell Iain Davidson Boulder CO University Press of Colorado
ISBN hardback US
pp b w photos gs tables
Sophie A de Beaune
This volume focuses on the multiple ways in which stone tools can inform archaeologists about the evolution of hom inin cognitive abilities One of the major questions addressed in the volume deals with the appearance of Oldowan which could be either the result of a dramatic change in cognitive abilities or the transition to a more archaeologically visible medium Another question concerns the similarities and dif ferences in cognition that underlie human and non human primate tool behaviour
Several research directions are presented here including PET scans of human knapping and questions concerning the origins of language and its relation to learn ing The hypotheses of the transition of hominin knapping from a common ancestor with cognitive abilities similar to chimpanzees and bonobos is discussed by some authors
In chapter Mark W Moore shows that human infants and primates use similar strategies to organize u erances and motor actions Initially similar these strategies called grammars of action evolve into an ontogenetic divergence in children that leads to a separation of complex linguistic and action grammars This paper develops a model of the essential motor actions of stoneworking interpretable in action grammar terms It is a new version of typology based
CAJ McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi S
Reviews
on an understanding of processes of ake removal It is comparable to the standard vehicle developed recently by Miriam Haidle she terms a cognigram used to compare the tool use of non humans and early hominins From his grammar of actions Mark W Moore describes pos sible stages in the development of stone knapping complex ity among early hominins However the author notes that stone tool manufacture did not necessarily re ect maximum abilities of human and perhaps hominin ancestors Indeed cognitively modern Homo sapiens sometimes knapped stones in ways that were very similar to non modern hominins Consequently it is necessary to take into account social and or environmental pressures and not only cognitive evolu tion in order to understand increasing complexity in stone tool manufacture
Ignacio de la Torre chapter discusses the nature of the early Oldowan its implications for understanding the cognitive capabilities of the earliest knappers and its rela tionships to ape tool use He argues against the proposition according to which the emergence of stone knapping would originate in percussion activities involved in food processing especially hammer and anvil technique to crack out nuts For him evidence of hammer and anvil technique displayed by some capuchin monkeys of the New World invalidates such a hypothesis if we admit that this technical behaviour was present in a common ancestor we have to admit that the shared hominid ancestor to chimpanzees and capuchins had those technological abilities mya ago Obviously this is hard to support Personally I would suggest that this tech nique to crack nuts could have been invented independently by some chimpanzees in Africa and some capuchins in the New World Why did they have to share a common ances tor with this technical aptitude There is no reason to reject possible convergence Such a hypothesis does not exclude the possibility that percussion activity could have evolved towards stone tool behaviour in some places However the gap between nut cracking activity and stone knapping is more cognitive than technical The actions of chimpanzees cracking nuts and Oldowan hominids knapping stone tools or producing akes are not qualitatively di erent and the control of the speed and the strength of the action is equally important for a positive result in the two cases However producing a conchoidal fracture presupposes the choice of an area of impact on the basis of the mass and shape of the block and requires precision in the strength and direction of the blow Indeed the actions are virtually the same but the mental processes di er mental images of the aimed object are required So we have to look for the explanation for the qualitative jump between the two types of percussion in modi cations of cognitive ability and not of the capacity for manual skill
In chapter April Nowell and Mark White try to understand some of the repetitive pa erning in early stone tools The Acheulian and contemporary technological systems are remarkably static For them some of the stasis visible in the archaeological record may be the result of demographic and not necessarily cognitive factors They also explore how the insertion of a uniquely human childhood stage of growth and development into the typical primate
pa ern a ects learning and sociability The duration of childhood and adolescence may have been considerably shorter in Middle Pleistocene hominins who experienced a faster pace of development than modern humans A short childhood in small groups with limited peers with whom to play experiment and learn new tricks could be retarding true innovation This hypothesis is coherent with Gilbert Simondon s ideas about early acquisition of technical knowl edge by daily and deep impregnation perhaps characterized by some rigidity due to a lack of thinking discussing and handing over in question at adulthood
Another way to understand the cognitive context of Oldowan knappers is to look for the evidence of forethought planning and enhanced working memory Thomas Wynn and Frederick L Coolidge chapter compare the Levallois reduction and the façonnage strategy of bifaces in terms of long term working memory They brilliantly demonstrate that the cognitive demands of biface reduction required fewer procedural subroutines and less working memory capacity In its overall organization the retrieval structure deployed by a Levallois knapper was no di erent from those deployed by modern artisans The power of expert retrieval structures has evolved over the course of hominin evolution They argue that Levallois reduction per se does not require Theory of Mind and they explore the possibility that learning Levallois reduction did
The depth of intentionality is studied by Steven L Kuhn chapter through the identi cation of standardized tools I agree with the author when he puts the emphasis on the fact that it is necessary to take into account that some archaeological analyses force the appearance of standardiza tion Because they are in uenced by so many factors artefact forms may be less informative about technological intention among ancient hominins than are core reduction and raw material exploitation
Sarah Wurz chapter questions the wider sig ni cance of the characteristics of the European Palaeolithic industries in relation to the Middle Stone Age industries of South Africa The MSA MSA and Howiesons Poort from Klasies River Mouth are discussed in the context of symbolic behaviour and its palaeoanthropological and archaeological indicators Like Steven L Kuhn Sarah Wurz brings into relief the di culty for analysts to separate out those components of stone tools that may indicate style and convention from which symbolic representation can then be inferred
Dietrich Stout chapter explores the possible evolu tionary relations between complex tool use and language Three possible types of coevolutionary interactions are cur rently proposed interactions involving shared neural sub strates hierarchical combination in the inferior frontal gyrus and action understanding in the cortical mirror neuron system shared social context mental state a ribution and joint a ention contribution of language to skill learning and cooperative activity and shared reliance on general capaci ties such as working memory These three possibilities are not mutually exclusive To evaluate the actual evolutionary signi cance of these possible relations D Stout undertook functional brain imaging studies of Lower Palaeolithic tool
Reviews
making For him this study demonstrates an overlap with cortical language circuits consistent with motor hypotheses of speech and language origins Ethnographic and develop mental evidence highlights the role of joint a ention and intentional communication in the social reproduction of both stone knapping and language skills
In chapter Iain Davidson summarizes some previ ously published works about the comparison of the earli est stone tools with chimpanzee tool making and use He then wonders about its implications for understanding the evolution of hominin and human cognition He argues that cu ing is one of the key innovations making stone tools part of the hominin adaptation I agree with him but I want to add a remark about the invention of cu ing which is the contribution that most clearly identi es hominization the conception of tools not found in nature which is within the reach of chimpanzees or the steps allowing the resolu tion of the problem of cu ing by the production of cu ing edges It seems that never having discovered cu ing the apes were unable to master the actions required for cu ing rubbing grating and grinding Why are apes unable to cut Maybe because the cracking action known by some apes
supposes a rst degree intention for instance cracking open nuts while cu ing action supposes an additional degree of complexity beyond their reach Indeed cu ing action supposes two distinct stages rst producing cu ing edges second subsequent use Davidson opines that the cores and abandoned akes created a new environment of opportunity In my opinion he is here victim of retrospec tive illusion a ake with a cu ing edge is only useful if one already knows cu ing tools This link is obvious for us but was not for the rst hominins
In the nal chapter Philip Barnard proposes a contri bution from the perspective of a behavioural scientist His understanding of a more complex model of cognition and its evolution allows for the early emergence among apes and the last common ancestor of apes and humans of complex spatial praxis actions This model predicts that complex vocal u erances and combinations of them emerged earlier among hominins than the re exive thought generated only from the inputs of mental activity of the agent concerned
The interest of this book lies in providing a be er understanding of the relation between cognitive and tech nological evolution of the rst hominins Stone tools may well be the best way to get at the really important changes in the evolution of our ancestors It is appropriate to note that cognitive and archeological studies about the emergence of cognitive human abilities are currently very proli c with at least two major publications in published by Cambridge University Press and by Wiley Blackwell
Sophie A de Beaune Lyon III University
and UMR ArScAn
Maison René Ginouvès allée de l Université F Nanterre Cedex France sophie de beaune mae u paris fr
Reference
Haidle M How to think a single spear in Cognitive Archaeology
and Human Evolution eds S A de Beaune F L Coolidge
T Wynn Cambridge Cambridge University Press
Clovis Technology by Bruce A Bradley Michael B
Collins Andrew Hemmings with contributions by Marilyn Shoberg Jon C Lohse Ann Arbor MI
International Monographs in Prehistory ISBN hardback US ISBN paperback US
xiii pp col plates gs tables
Christopher Ellis
This volume provides a detailed synthetic overview of Clovis technology Although a number of researchers accept a Pre Clovis presence in the Americas Clovis remains the earliest well established and substantial occupation at c
cal Yet the technology has been poorly docu mented as until the last years it has been primarily reported via limited kill site assemblages The discovery of the large Gault Texas campsite associated with a tool stone source the appearance of detailed reports on other sites known for some time Murray Springs Arizona and the discovery and more detailed reporting of a number of caches e g Richey Washington Anzick Montana has begun to provide a be er basis upon which to document synthesize and eventually explain the nature of Clovis technology
In the rst chapter the authors admit that a major problem is deciding what characteristics to use in de ning Clovis Are Clovis sites de ned by the form of nished stone points or by points of a certain form made in certain ways or by a distinctive combination of point forms with other lithic organic tools and their associated production technology In the end the authors are pragmatic and do admit there may not have been a single Clovis technological complex All they would like to do is establish a base line construct that is not the nal word but can be used in future comparative studies In practice this perspective leads them to focus on points and distinctive aspects of their production technology as the main criteria but also to acknowledge that those points o en but not always occur in conjunction with a true blade industry and where spo ily preserved apparently a consistent suite of organic tool forms made in certain basic ways
The rst chapters focus on the blade technology Chapters and bifacial technology Chapter and organic artefacts Chapter While listed as joint e orts these chapters are primarily the work of Collins Bradley and Hemmings respectively who have each wri en exten sively elsewhere on those topics For example the organic technology section includes descriptions of di erent types of objects that are paraphrased from Hemmings
CAJ McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi S
