This article reconsiders the early hominid ‘‘lithic niche’’ by examining the social implications of stone artifact making. I reject the idea that making tools for use is an adequate explanation of the elaborate artifact forms of the Lower Palaeolithic, or a sufficient cause for long-term trends in hominid technology. I then advance an alternative mechanism founded on the claim that competency in making stone artifacts requires extended learning, and that excellence in artifact making is attained only by highly skilled individuals (...) who have been taught and practiced for extensive periods. Consequently both competency and expertise in knapping comes at a high learning cost for both the individual learner and the social group to which they belong. Those high intrinsic costs of learning created contexts in which groups selected cost-reducing forms of social learning and teaching, and in which specialization could develop. Artifacts and their manufacturing processes probably acquired functions as social signals—as honest signals of valuable capacities. The magnification of these signals, through competition between knappers and through inspiring later craftspeople, may account for a substantial amount of the accumulated elaboration visible in the archaeological record. Consequently lithic artifacts operated as material symbols from an early time in hominid evolution. (shrink)

In the decades after McBreatry and Brook’s refutation of revolutionary, saltationist models of behavioral modernity, that framework for interpreting the hominin (and especially the sapiens) archaeological record of the Late Pleistocene did not disappear from the human evolutionary sciences. It was retained to explain a remarkable Late Pleistocene pattern of accelerated innovation, geographic and ecological expansion, and, in some versions, the replacement by sapiens of sister taxa; these changes resulting at least in part from enhanced cognitive capacities. In this revised (...) version of the behavioral modernity framework, the origin and/or expansion of the use of material symbols was seen as especially significant. Material symbol use is a marker of both social and cognitive change; in some versions, a marker of sapiens’ acquisition of full language. This article is critical of the view that material symbol use is an index of sophisticated cognitive capacity, and develops an alternative conception of behavioral modernity and the Late Pleistocene pattern. The alternative conception emphasizes the efficient and effective forager organization of the education of their young, the role of an expanded social network, and the importance of threshold effects on technology and skill: the more a community has, the more it can get. (shrink)

The articles in this issue represent the pursuit of a new understanding of the human past, one that can replace the neo-saltationist view of a human revolution with models that can account for the complexities of the archaeological record and of human social lives. The articulation of archaeological, philosophical, and biological perspectives seems to offer a strong foundation for exploring available evidence, and this was the rationale for collecting these particular articles. Even at this preliminary stage there is a coherence (...) emerging in proposals: the origin and operation of symbolically rich, complexly signaling human social systems was the consequence of the long-term evolution of multiple components of perceiving and negotiating social interactions, a contingent outcome of myriad adaptive shifts rather than a single event. (shrink)