The Enhanced Working Memory Model

This chapter traces the origins and currents of Frederick Coolidge’s collaborations with archaeologist Thomas Wynn. It begins with their first article, in 2001, in which they traced a cultural explosion some 50,000 years ago in the archaeological record (as attested by the appearance of things like cave paintings, highly ritualized burials, depictive figurines) to enhanced executive functions (i.e., temporal sequencing, inhibition, planning, and organization) that perhaps resulted from an earlier genetic or epigenetic event not shared by Neandertals. As evidence of enhanced executive functioning in Homo sapiens, Wynn and Coolidge offered barbed points from Katanda, bow-and-arrow technology, agriculture, and the colonization of the Sahul. In their more recent papers, they labeled the cognitive consequence of this genetic event enhanced working memory, thus incorporating their ideas into Baddeley’s multicomponent model of working memory. The chapter ends with speculations on the evolutionary origins of learning and memory systems, looking back to the very beginnings of life on earth.

The Stories Stones Tell of Language and Its Evolution

Language origins remain shrouded in mystery. With little remaining from our earliest ancestors, language evolution researchers have turned to stone tools to learn about ancestral language capacities, as discussed in this chapter. Because inferior frontal areas of the brain, once thought specific to language, are now known to participate during manual motor tasks as well, technological-origin hypotheses propose that tool-making was a potential cause or contributor to the evolution of language. Cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to monitor regional brain activation patterns associated with tool-making processes are helping to investigate the potential evolutionary relationship between language and tool-making. These experiments have identified one area in the left dorsal pars opercularis portion of Broca’s area where language and stone tool-making functions rely on similar cognitive operations. A more general motor origin for language seems likely in other inferior frontal areas of the brain. Clearly, stone tools have stories to tell if we know how to listen.

The Origin of Cumulative Culture

Cumulative culture is widely seen as a uniquely human characteristic involving distinct cognitive and behavioral performances. In searching for its origin, different factors have been suggested as crucial, based on comparative studies, and dates proposed as to when cumulative culture may have emerged in human evolution. This chapter reviews possible factors, suggesting that several are necessary, not only in the social sphere but also in the individual and environmental spheres. These interdependent factors have developed in three developmental dimensions (evolutionary-biological, ontogenetic-individual, and historical-social) in interaction with the specific environment. The interplay of basic factors and developmental dimensions shows a slow and gradual development of cumulative culture from its basis to simple and advanced donated culture. The onset of cumulative culture is concluded not to have been a single-trait event that occurred in a relatively short time but rather, the result of multifactorial and gradual processes that unfolded over millions of years.

Evolution of Cognitive Archaeology through Evolving Cognitive Systems

Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.

The Evolution of Social Transmission in the Acheulean

Human social transmission is unrivalled in its precision and complexity. High-fidelity social transmission ensures each generation does not have to reinvent the wheel, while the sharing of knowledge and skills enables the extraordinary feats of technology and artistry. This chapter explores the evolutionary foundations of our high-fidelity social transmission during the Acheulean period. Archaeological evidence is presented for the trait of over-imitation: the tendency of humans to copy all purposeful actions when imitating, regardless of whether they are causally opaque, or even redundant. By the Late Acheulean, the causal opacity and physical subtlety of some knapping actions were such that they were likely difficult to transmit without some form of verbal teaching. Despite high-fidelity social transmission, cumulative culture does not seem to have begun building up in earnest during the Acheulean, perhaps because Acheulean hominins did not share our cognitive capacities for hierarchical organization, recursion, and generativity.

In Three Minds

Within cognitive archaeology, the Paleolithic mind is portrayed as rational, experiential, and anthropological. This chapter argues that the use of experiential and anthropological perspectives has the potential to enrich archaeological interpretations of early hominin cognition through the use of emotional and relational aspects. Wynn’s evolutionary cognitive archaeology is extended by using affective and material standpoints to explore the spaces between minds. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the work of Thomas Wynn to the development of the discipline and offers avenues to incorporate social, emotional, and relational aspects of mind in the study of early cognition—for example, the involvement of theory of mind when considering stone knapping, and the cultural transmission of early stone tool industries such as the Lomekwian. In a case study of the Middle Paleolithic site of Bruniquel Cave, the three approaches to the Paleolithic mind are explored, as well as their distinct interpretations.

Cultural Transmission from the Last Common Ancestor to the Levallois Reducers

Given the gap between ape and human cultural capacities, the question of what we can infer about evolving cultural capacities during the course of human evolution presents itself. Tom Wynn has stressed the importance of a comparative (cross-species) approach and the idea of inferring only the minimal capacities required to explain archaeological phenomena in cognitive terms. In this chapter, these principles are applied to infer what can reasonably be determined about cultural transmission capacities in extinct hominins from the last common ancestor to the producers of Levallois. Although much remains to be learned, and a provisional model must caution against false negatives and false positive attributions, the approach yields reasonable inferences regarding our evolving cultural capacities over the long stretch of time from the end of the Miocene through to the later Middle Pleistocene. This situation also leads to a position where possible avenues of future enquiry might usefully be identified.

Flake-Making and the “Cognitive Rubicon”

Stone tools have a continuous record extending some 3.3 million years. Our hominin ancestors engaged in relatively simple stone flaking, and stone tools of extreme complexity were produced by cognitively modern humans in the Pleistocene and Holocene. For this reason, stone tools offer a tangible means for tracking the evolution of cognition in our genus. This chapter discusses a recent series of experiments controlled for modern flintknapper intent, the results suggesting that aspects of ancient tool forms sometimes viewed as deliberate can in fact be produced with no more intention than that seen in the removal of individual flakes. But the removal of individual flakes is itself a cognitively challenging task, one that places the earliest hominin flintknappers across the “cognitive Rubicon” from their primate relatives.

Homo artifex

While stone tools provide only the narrowest keyhole view of the lives of our ancestors, new theory and methods that explicitly focus on the interaction of organisms and environments over time—niche construction, the evolution of development, phenotypic accommodation, and gene–culture co-evolution—provide opportunities for squeezing “mind” from enigmatic stones. Tool-making, like language and theory of mind, is a culturally transmitted skill acquired through extended practice. It is also a key component of a human cultural niche that supports our unique adaptive strategy of large brains, cooperative breeding, and extended development. As discussed in this chapter, by deploying methods from the neural and behavioral sciences to better understand this archaeologically visible behavior, we can hope to more broadly illuminate the evolution of the human mind, brain, and culture.

On the Minds of Bow Hunters

Bow-and-arrow technology is arguably one of the key inventions in the human story. This chapter explores how some of the associated techno-behaviors helped shape the human mind, contributing to humans becoming masters of flexible thinking. Such cognitive plasticity is represented in our ability to learn, teach, innovate, and respond flexibly to new or complex situations. Evidence for bow hunting has been pushed back to more than 60,000 years ago in southern Africa, with some suggesting an even older age. The chapter also touches on potential neurological underpinnings for understanding the cognition of archery. It is suggested that by exploring the techno-behaviors and cognition associated with Stone Age bow hunting and neurological studies conducted in the context of modern archery, we can add to our understanding of the evolution of the sapient mind.