Does the Emergence of Paleolithic Body Ornamentation Signal an Unprecedented Aptitude for Symbolling Behavior or just a New Application?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Given the collective evidence for the Paleolithic in Eurasia, it is peculiar that the emergence of durable art in archaeological records is taken to reflect a parallel emergence for the capacity of hominins to engage in symboling behavior of any sort. The ample record of burial practices of during the Middle Paleolithic supports an interpretation of symbolic acts just as strongly as the art record of the Upper Paleolithic, albeit in a very different way. Here lies an important key to understanding hominin cognitive evolution that too often is disregarded, at the expense of addressing useful scientific questions. After reviewing the evidence, I discuss how the directionality and scope of communication (audience) of the two behaviors seems to have differed, and what that difference can (and cannot) mean for framing questions in future research on Neanderthals and modern humans.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22839