Revisiting the Evolutionary Significance of Stone Tools

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Because lithics preserve better than almost any other trace of human existence in the deep past, they receive the lion’s share of attention from Pleistocene archaeologists. In this paper we explore the theoretical and practical limitations of using lithics as subjects of evolutionary analyses. We base our discussion on rejecting the notion that lithic aggregates as found (or defined) in the course of archaeological work can be interpreted as reflecting intentionality or even ‘average behaviors’. This is because the co-occurrence of artifacts (recovered as and defined traditionally as an ‘assemblage’ from an excavation) is the result of fragmented multiple actions by often unrelated and chrono-spatially distinct agents (including the researcher who undertakes the analysis). We then revisit key concepts such as ‘adaptation’, ‘cultural transmission’, and ‘behavioral complexity’ in the absence of detectable intentionality and ‘cultural norms’. For this exercise, we distinguish between two scales of analysis: the artifact as ‘extended phenotype’ (Dawkins 1982) and the aggregate as record of human behavior and discuss the way selection, fitness, adaptation, cultural contact and acculturation, and others apply differently at these two scales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24945