Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of mind
Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of mind
New developments in neuroimaging have demonstrated that the basic capacities underpinning human social skills are shared by our closest extant primate relatives. The challenge for archaeologists is to explain how complex human societies evolved from this shared pattern of face-to-face social interaction. We argue that a key process was the gradual incorporation of material culture into social networks over the course of hominin evolution. Here we use three long-term processes in hominin evolution—encephalization, the global human diaspora and sedentism/agriculture—to illustrate how the cultural transmission of material culture allowed the ‘scaling up’ of face-to-face social interactions to the global societies known today. We conclude that future research by neuroimagers and archaeologists will need to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind human engagement with material culture as well as other persons
1969-1979
Gamble, Clive
1cbd0b26-ddac-4dc2-9cf7-59c66d06103a
Coward, F.
03199e07-3ce8-4e55-9b9c-c20b04576e58
June 2008
Gamble, Clive
1cbd0b26-ddac-4dc2-9cf7-59c66d06103a
Coward, F.
03199e07-3ce8-4e55-9b9c-c20b04576e58
Gamble, Clive
,
Coward, F.
(ed.)
(2008)
Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of mind.
Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 363 (1499), .
(doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0004).
Abstract
New developments in neuroimaging have demonstrated that the basic capacities underpinning human social skills are shared by our closest extant primate relatives. The challenge for archaeologists is to explain how complex human societies evolved from this shared pattern of face-to-face social interaction. We argue that a key process was the gradual incorporation of material culture into social networks over the course of hominin evolution. Here we use three long-term processes in hominin evolution—encephalization, the global human diaspora and sedentism/agriculture—to illustrate how the cultural transmission of material culture allowed the ‘scaling up’ of face-to-face social interactions to the global societies known today. We conclude that future research by neuroimagers and archaeologists will need to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind human engagement with material culture as well as other persons
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Published date: June 2008
Organisations:
Archaeology
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Local EPrints ID: 346154
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/346154
ISSN: 0962-8436
PURE UUID: 014d0391-7dbb-4274-abf6-1fad2f5cc7c6
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Date deposited: 19 Dec 2012 12:19
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 12:33
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Editor:
F. Coward
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