A Neurobiological Explanation for Spheroids as Embodied Cognition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spheroids (i.e., intentionally shaped or gathered round rocks) first appeared about 1.8 million years ago. Sahnouni et al. (1997) proposed that they were by-products from core reduction knapping. Walker (2008) concluded they served as evidence of modern-like behavior in a belief system. Wilson et al. (2016) viewed them as throwing-affordances for killing animals or self-defense. This paper provides a neurobiological basis for spheroids as throwing-affordances and proffers the hypothesis that they may also be examples of embodied cognition (e.g., Malafouris, 2013). Further, spheroids may have been instrumental in learning causality. Pulvermüller (2018) noted that action perception circuits served to coalesce motor and sensory information. Thus, spheroids may have developed as a dynamical throwing-affordance as a function of their perceptual characteristics, i.e., proper size, weight, and shape for throwing. Their instrumentality in learning causality was proposed by Piaget (1954), who thought children learned the link between their own actions and the movement of a ball (spheroid), thus instantiating the concept and consequences of causality. Children may have also perceived their affordant nature as ‘things that could be rolled’, i.e., prototypical ‘toys.’ Thus, considering spheroids as examples of embodied cognition ties together explanations as diverse as throwing- and rolling-affordances, and toys.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32422