Cognitive Archaeology: What Is It And What Does It Investigate?
How has human thought evolved? How is it possible to know what prehistoric humans thought? Is it possible that they resembled today’s primitive tribes? To what extent do these tribes serve as a model for understanding prehistoric symbolic thought?
All these questions are the subject of study of cognitive archeology, which tries to understand how cognitive abilities, especially symbolic thinking, developed in the first Homo sapiens. Below we will see in more depth what this very interesting discipline is about and how it tries to find out these questions.
Cognitive archeology is a discipline that tries to know, as far as possible, the way of thinking of prehistoric cultures Try to find out what kind of characteristics the mental processes of the earliest non-literary cultures in the evolution of Homo sapiens presented, including concepts such as space, time and the idea of I, us and them.
Basically it tries to understand how specifically human cognitive processes have emerged in the history of evolution, and in what form they have appeared, relating it to anatomical aspects, especially of the speech apparatus and the skull, in addition to analyzing the fossil record and archaeological remains of these same cultures.
Objectives and theory
The main objective of cognitive archeology is the archaeological study, based on the psychobiological model. Try to understand the origin and development of human behavior throughout history.
The idea behind this discipline is that, if the remains, especially grave goods, cave paintings and jewelry from primitive cultures, are taken, can be interpreted as behavior, a behavior that, behind it, had to have symbolic capacities, the product of an entire cognitive processing. This mental processing had to occur in response to stimuli external to the individual, both social (family, other members of the group and members of other groups) or environmental (changes in climate, scarce food…) that are felt or they receive from the environment in which they live.
Voluntary human behavior and thinking are two phenomena that are clearly related. This is an almost obvious idea for most of the population. When we are going to do something, as long as it is not something automated or the product of a reflex action, there is a procedure behind it. When we paint a painting or make a ceramic jug, we are not doing it automatically, we have to think about everything.
This same idea would be shared with cognitive archeology when studying the artistic remains of prehistoric cultures. When one of the first humans was painting a wildebeest on a wall or making a bone necklace, behind this behavior, there had to necessarily be a cognitive process In the first case, the artist had to paint the wildebeest to represent a reality, such as that there were those animals in that area or that he should be careful with them. In the second, the making of the necklace could have some religious meaning, or be a symbol of power.
Although cognitive archeology is based on the idea that it is possible to know the type of thinking that prehistoric people must have had, the truth is that this can never be known in a 100% reliable way.
What does this discipline take into account?
The current discipline of cognitive archeology uses the psychobiological model, that is, one who understands that the human being is an organism with a biological and cultural nature. That is why human behavior must be understood in an interdisciplinary way, combining knowledge from both health and social sciences, such as evolutionary biology, neurology, psychology and sociology.
When studying and making hypotheses about how the evolution of human thought and symbolic capacity occurred, the following aspects are taken into account:
At an evolutionary level, they are taken into account the anatomical characteristics of fossils from different Homo sapiens
The evolutionary process is progressive, rarely sudden. This means that we did not go from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens overnight, but rather there was a gradual process that involved changes in anatomical characteristics, including speech apparatus and cranial capacity.
Our species has been changing anatomically over the millennia, and this has been seen in culture. One of the hypotheses raised when analyzing the increasing complexity of human cultures has been that it has gone hand in hand with an increase in cognitive abilities.
2. Neurological characteristics
Related to the previous point, the human brain has been the result of a long and continuous evolutionary process, which has contributed to it acquiring a larger size and more folds to increase its surface
This, along with improvements in the speech apparatus thanks to bipedalism, has been what has been able to house the symbolic capacity, which is the basis for thought and language.
Thanks to this symbolic capacity, human beings have been able to create abstract concepts, in addition to getting out of space-time immediacy, that is, stopping thinking only about the here and now.
3. Influence of external factors
The human being, both the current and the most primitive, has been determined by what was written in their genes His basic intelligence, an aspect that we could well call quantitative, was something inherited.
However, the most primitive cultures, as with children who go to school today, were influenced by external factors, that is, their environment and society. This is what would give them a qualitative difference intellectually speaking.
Members who grew up in a specific group received influences from it in the form of culture actively participating in it: they participated in rituals, they buried their dead according to how the rest of their fellow humans did, they used paint and body accessories…
In cognitive archeology we have tried to see regional differences between groups of Homo sapiens original from their remains seeing the existence of different cultures, although most of them with a fairly similar level of development
4. Psychobiological organization
Once the human being acquires the ability to create symbols with their meaning, as is the case of language, the human being is capable of using his intelligence to solve cultural or social problems.
critics
As we have already seen, although the study of cognitive archeology is quite exhaustive, There are doubts about whether it is possible to analyze and obtain information about the thinking of early humans from their fossil remains and tools Can we know with complete certainty how human cognitive abilities evolved from what they left behind?
As we were already saying, the idea behind this discipline is that by analyzing both cultural remains and the bones of the first human beings it is possible, through inferences, to know what their symbolic capacity must have been like. Furthermore, this is done by relating it to current primitive cultures, that is, tribal cultures, some of them wordless, which are presumed to live in a very similar way to how prehistoric cultures must have lived. It should also be said that this conception is somewhat prejudiced.
However, there are those who consider that, although it is true that the art and objects left behind by early humans is a clue to how they might think there is really no guarantee that they were given the function that is modernly attributed to them.
