scholarly journals 4E cognition in the Lower Palaeolithic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Wynn ◽  
Karenleigh A. Overmann ◽  
Lambros Malafouris
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cognitive Archaeology ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
Computational Processes ◽  
Lower Palaeolithic

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past 50 years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological record can only be an ‘‘external’’ product or the behavioral trace of ‘‘internal’’ representational and computational processes. In comparison, the 4E approach helps us to overcome this dualist representational logic, allowing us to engage directly with the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process, and thus ground a more parsimonious cognitive archaeology. It also treats stone tools, the primary vestiges of hominin thinking, as active participants in mental life. The 4E approach offers a better grounding for understanding hominin technical expertise, a crucially important component of hominin cognitive evolution.

scholarly journals 4E cognition in the Lower Palaeolithic

2020 ◽  
pp. 105971232096718
Author(s):  
Thomas Wynn ◽  
Karenleigh A Overmann ◽  
Lambros Malafouris
Keyword(s):  
Stone Tools ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cognitive Archaeology ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
Computational Processes ◽  
Lower Palaeolithic

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past 50 years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological record can only be an “external” product or the behavioral trace of “internal” representational and computational processes. In comparison, the 4E approach helps us to overcome this dualist representational logic, allowing us to engage directly with the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process, and thus ground a more parsimonious cognitive archaeology. It also treats stone tools, the primary vestiges of hominin thinking, as active participants in mental life. The 4E approach offers a better grounding for understanding hominin technical expertise, a crucially important component of hominin cognitive evolution.

scholarly journals An Introduction to Cognitive Archaeology

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 386-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Coolidge ◽  
Thomas Wynn
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Homo Erectus ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cognitive Archaeology ◽  
Cave Art

Cognitive archaeology studies human cognitive evolution by applying cognitive-science theories and concepts to archaeological remains of the prehistoric past. After reviewing the basic epistemological stance of cognitive archaeology, this article illustrates this interdisciplinary endeavor through an examination of two of the most important transitions in hominin cognitive evolution—the appearance of Homo erectus about 2 million years ago, and the recent enhancement of working-memory capacity within the past 200,000 years. Although intentionally created stone tools date to about 3.3 million years ago, Homo erectus produced a bifacial, symmetrical handaxe whose design then persisted for nearly the next 2 million years. An enhancement in working-memory capacity may have been responsible for the relative explosion of culture within the past 50,000 years, which included personal ornamentation, highly ritualized burials, bow-and-arrow technology, depictive cave art, and artistic figurines.

Palaeoliths from the lower reaches of the Bristol Avon

1954 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. D. Lacaille
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Ice Sheets ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lower Palaeolithic

The fact that the Pleistocene ice-sheets mantled so great a part of Britain was long regarded as sufficient explanation of the absence of Lower Palaeolithic remains from the territory south of a line drawn from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. Recent work and finds, however, show that during genial conditions early man certainly moved quite far into areas freed by the waning ice during periods of retreat. Thus, from extremes beyond those cited, there are reports of a few Lower Palaeolithic implements from Pleistocene gravels in the valley of the Trent in Lincolnshire, from the valley of the Don and from Huntow, in Yorkshire, and of an odd piece from Cheshire. But of most import to the present study are the Lower Palaeolithic stone tools from the basin of the Severn in the Midlands, and an Acheulian hand-axe has been found within the past few months at Pen-y-lan, near Cardiff. With the palaeoliths discovered at intermediate sites in the basin of this great river the range in the Atlantic drainage is extended from Somerset into once glaciated territory.

scholarly journals Cut marks on bone surfaces: influences on variation in the form of traces of ancient behaviour

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 20160006 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Braun ◽  
Michael Pante ◽  
William Archer
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Properties ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Rock Type ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Indentation Hardness ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Substantial Evidence ◽  
Cut Marks ◽  
The Past ◽  
Animal Bones

Although we know that our lineage has been producing sharp-edged tools for over 2.6 Myr, our knowledge of what they were doing with these tools is far less complete. Studies of these sharp-edged stone tools show that they were most probably used as cutting implements. However, the only substantial evidence of this is the presence of cut marks on the bones of animals found in association with stone tools in ancient deposits. Numerous studies have aimed to quantify the frequency and placement of these marks. At present there is little consensus on the meaning of these marks and how the frequency relates to specific behaviours in the past. Here we investigate the possibility that mechanical properties associated with edges of stone tools as well as the properties of bones themselves may contribute to the overall morphology of these marks and ultimately their placement in the archaeological record. Standardized tests of rock mechanics (Young's modulus and Vickers hardness) indicate that the hardness of tool edges significantly affects cut-mark morphology. In addition, we show that indentation hardness of bones also impacts the overall morphology of cut marks. Our results show that rock type and bone portions influence the shape and prevalence of cut marks on animal bones.

Stone Tool Life Meets Everyday Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Carr ◽  
Andrew P. Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Tool Life ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Chipped Stone ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Organization Of Technology

Often, the lives of people in the past were constrained by their basic everyday needs and what they needed to accomplish. This chapter considers both how people conducted certain minimal activities everyday to meet those needs and how those activities left traces in the archaeological record. An Organization of Technology model articulates the archaeological record (artifact form and distribution) not only through activities and technological strategy but also through other considerations. The authors explore the possibilities of how examining the everyday life of an individual in the past just from discarded Lithics is possible: from the stone’s first procurement for the manufacture of chipped stone tools, to the stone’s use in various activities before it’s either (eventually) discarded or reused, to the stone’s finally recovery by archaeologists.

EDITORIAL: Migration and competitiveness: Japan and the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Variable Cost ◽  
Fixed Cost ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Key Sectors ◽  
Past Half

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.

Five Years and Count(er)ing: Memoir after Memoir

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Norbert Bugeja
Keyword(s):  
Guest Editor ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Perspectives ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Ongoing Project

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of ‘articulacy-in-difficulty’ active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue on New Longitudinal Data for Retirement Analysis and Policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Marco Angrisani ◽  
Anya Samek ◽  
Arie Kapteyn
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Survey Questionnaires ◽  
Internet Panels

The number of data sources available for academic research on retirement economics and policy has increased rapidly in the past two decades. Data quality and comparability across studies have also improved considerably, with survey questionnaires progressively converging towards common ways of eliciting the same measurable concepts. Probability-based Internet panels have become a more accepted and recognized tool to obtain research data, allowing for fast, flexible, and cost-effective data collection compared to more traditional modes such as in-person and phone interviews. In an era of big data, academic research has also increasingly been able to access administrative records (e.g., Kostøl and Mogstad, 2014; Cesarini et al., 2016), private-sector financial records (e.g., Gelman et al., 2014), and administrative data married with surveys (Ameriks et al., 2020), to answer questions that could not be successfully tackled otherwise.

scholarly journals Special Issue “Molecular Basis of Inherited Diseases in Companion Animals”

Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Steven G. Friedenberg ◽  
Danika L. Bannasch
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Basis ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Inherited Diseases ◽  
The Past

The study of inherited diseases in companion animals has exploded over the past 15 years since the publication of the first dog genome in 2005 [...]

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