The Evolution of Early Symbolic Behavior

Understanding the unique evolutionary trajectory taken by the human species is impossible without appreciation of our special capacities for symbolic cognition and behavior. But how did these capacities evolve during the late Middle Palaeolithic?

Within only the last couple of decades, early milestones in human symbolic behavior have been continuously revised as new excavations across the globe challenge previous long-held assumption.

However, at the same time we have made little progress in our understanding of past symbolic behaviour and the mechanisms by which it evolved.

As tools of the mind, symbols are constituted by the intangible cognitive processes they evoke in pragmatic use contexts, which are inaccessible to the standard methods of archaeology or genetics.

With eSYMb, I will establish a novel integrative framework for the systematic investigation of early symbolic evolution directly frontloading records from archaeology in experimental investigations and computational modelling based on state-of-the-art methods from the cognitive sciences.

Starting from the assumption that symbolic artefacts evolve adaptively over time to better fulfil their intended functions, I will investigate these structural changes and their cognitive implications to inform inferences about their past use.

The framework will thus establish transparent, data-driven methods and criteria to test – for the first time - concrete hypotheses about early human symbolic behaviour from 6+ archaeological sites from the late Middle and early Upper Palaeolithic (~150.000 – 12.000-years ago) based on measures critical to symbolic cognition and behaviour.

In summary, the objective of eSYMb is to bring systematic scientific rigour to the investigation and interpretation of early human symbolic behaviour particularly from.