Prehistoric Minds: Human Origins as a Cultural Artefact, 1780-2010 (London: Royal Society of London: 2011).

On 8 July 2010 the front page of The Guardian newspaper featured an attractive colour drawing by the artist John Sibbick. It was entitled ‘Meet the Norfolk relatives’ and it depicted a pastoral scene of farmers and hunters going about their daily routines. However, the image was not included to illustrate a gargantuan sum recently paid for an impressionist painting. Nor was it a taster for an article about a long-lost work of art. This drawing was slightly different from the kinds that one would normally see on the front of a leading British newspaper. Its subjects were naked. Their bodies were hairy. They were, in fact, an artist’s impression of the early humans who lived on the Norfolk coast a million years ago...

Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 139, 2005 Lectures, 2007

This chapter discusses the attempts of pinpointing the origins of humans, i.e. Homo sapiens sapiens. Due to the recent advances in archaeology, specifically in archaeogenetics, it has been determined that the Homo sapiens sapiens originated in Africa 200,000 years ago, and that the speciation phase of human development occurred before that time. The chapter shows that cognitive archaeology would need to analyse more carefully the nature of mind, as well as seek further insight into the processes that underlie the achievements that characterise those different trajectories of development and change.

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and …, 1992

Two competing hypotheses have long dominated specialist thinking on modern human origins. The first posits that modern people emerged in a limited area and spread from there to replace archaic people elsewhere. Proponents of this view currently favor Africa as the modern human

Kendall-Hunt, 2021

An up-to-date, well-illustrated introduction to the techniques and results of archaeology, the study of humanity's evolution and ancient past. A fully-referenced, low-cost text, well-illustrated with the author's trademark diagrams, maps and photographs from archaeological work worldwide and spanning early hominin studies to historical archaeology.

2009

List of figures page viii List of tables ix Preface xi 1 Introduction 1 2 If chimps could talk 18 3 Fossils and what they tell us 33 4 Group size and settlement 53 5 Teaching, sharing and exchange 70 6 Origins of language and symbolism 90 7 Elementary structures of kinship 8 A new synthesis 9 Conclusions Glossary References Index viii 1 Social anthropology is a discipline largely missing from the study of human origins. Until now, the discipline has sidelined itself. Yet its central concerns with notions like society, culture and cross-cultural comparison make it of the utmost relevance for understanding the origins of human social life, and relevant too as an aid for speculation on the kinds of society our ancestors inhabited. Like archaeologists, social anthropologists can dig backwards through layers of time, into the origins of language, symbolism, ritual, kinship and the ethics and politics of reciprocity. When did human origins begin? That is a trick question. Of course, human origins began when humanity began, but in another sense human origins began when origins became an intellectual issue. There is no real history of engagement between social anthropology and early humanity, so one must be created here. Social anthropology's ancestral disciplines, like moral philosophy and jurisprudence, natural history and antiquarianism, travelogue and philology, all fed into post-medieval developments in building a picture of 'early man'. Yet, as I have implied, social anthropology proper has been absent. Since the days of Franz Boas at the dawn of the twentieth century, the study of human origins has been seen instead as the preserve of biological or physical anthropology. While not wishing to encroach too deeply into biological territory, in this book I want to carve out within social anthropology a new subdiscipline. I see this as a subdiscipline that touches on the biological and makes full use too of a century and a half of social anthropology-its accumulated experience and especially some of its more recent, and relevant, developments. Scientific interest in human origins in fact has quite a long history. Seventeenth-century European thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke speculated on the 'natural' condition of 'man', and its relation to the earliest forms of human society. Eighteenth-century thinkers continued this tradition, and archaeological and linguistic concerns were added at that time. In the nineteenth century, the theory or theories of evolution, as well as important fossil finds like the first Neanderthal in 1857 and Pithecanthropus in 1891, provided much added impetus. Indeed, the later A short history of human origins The seventeenth century Archaeology, or more accurately its predecessor, antiquarian studies, emerged as an amateur pursuit in the seventeenth century. Even before that, in the early sixteenth century, Italian geologists had speculated on the idea of stone tools as antecedents of iron ones (Trigger 1989: 53). However, the great social thinkers like Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and even Locke were not among those who had such notions. Social theory in the seventeenth century seemed almost completely oblivious to such insights and to the growing interest, throughout much of Europe, in early technology and in comparisons between Europeans of the past and the inhabitants of Africa or the Americas at the time. In retrospect, Darwinian theory, though, might as easily be contrasted to Monboddo's. Far from being a 'forerunner of Darwin', as is often said, Monboddo embodies an otherwise never-fully realized eighteenth-century vision which is the antithesis of Darwin. If in probing the boundaries of 'man' Monboddo defined the 'Orang Outang' as part of the category, Darwin did the opposite: he defined 'man' as an 'ape' (figure 1.1). Linnaeus came close to seeing both sides of the problem that would haunt Darwin when (later Lord Avebury), were also prominent in archaeology. Among other twists of fate, the foremost ethnologist of the late nineteenth century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, met Henry Christie while travelling in Cuba in 1856, and Christie persuaded him to accompany him to Mexico. Christie, like Lubbock a banker, ethnologist and archaeologist, was

2008

The papers in this volume cover ca. 35,000 years of prehistory within the British Isles, from the fi rst appearance of anatomically modern humans at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic to the early centuries of the fi rst millennium A.D. when Britain and Ireland were brought within the orbit of Roman and early post-Roman Europe, and so “history” of sorts. The volume is not intended as a comprehensive overview of British prehistory, nor is it organised along the lines of a linear or period-based narrative (such accounts are available, notably Hunter and Ralston 1999; Bradley 2007). Rather, it provides a theoretically informed review of current research set within a thematic format. These themes include: the interpretation of major points of social, ideological and economic transition (during the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic–Neolithic and the Middle Bronze Age); landscape and inhabitation; domestic and ceremonial architecture; foodways; productive technology; exchange; identity; and...

The history of the excavation of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Northamptonshire is reviewed. Recent excavations are then set within the growing understanding of Neolithic and Bronze Age chronologies on a national level, which is emerging from new excavations and new approaches to radiocarbon dating. Northamptonshire is shown to be making a continuing, if relatively small, contribution to this process through both commercial archaeology and the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2010

Eoliths' were crude but purportedly humanly worked stones that exercised a great deal of scientific interest between about 1870 and 1930. They became a problem in the context of the debate surrounding the existence of pre-humans in Europe before the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, and are now mostly reckoned to be of non-human origin. This paper addresses the way in which a network of geologists and prehistorians associated with Benjamin Harrison, the celebrated collector of the first English eoliths, attempted to make sense of barely recognizable artefacts in the period immediately following the establishment of human antiquity in the face of orthodox creationist chronologies. Harrison and his associates did so by innovating a series of criteria, names, categories and crosscutting classifications drawn from their own cultural experience, and typologies available to them through the comparative ethnography of technology. Using concepts and insights developed in cognitive anthropology, we shall attempt to shed light on a controversy in the history of science that has implications for our understanding of the way in which scientists more generally employ 'provisional classifications', folk categories and vernacular terminology in order to make sense of domains of intractable data at the frontiers of knowledge.