Cognitive archeology: what is it and what does it research?

How has human thought evolved? How is it possible to know what prehistoric humans thought? Is it possible that they resembled the primitive tribes of today? To what extent do these tribes serve as a model for understanding prehistoric symbolic thought?

All these questions are the object of study of cognitive archeology, which tries to know how cognitive abilities, especially symbolic thinking, were developed in the first Homo sapiens. Next we will see in more depth what this very interesting discipline is about and how it tries to find out these questions.

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What is cognitive archeology?

Cognitive archeology is a discipline that try to know, as far as possible, the way of thinking of prehistoric cultures. He tries to find out what kinds of characteristics the mental processes of the most literate cultures exhibited. early in the evolution of Homo sapiens, including concepts such as space, time and the idea of ​​the self, we and them.

Basically it tries to understand how properly human cognitive processes have emerged in the history of evolution, and in what form they have appeared, relating it to anatomical aspects, especially 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, relying on the psychobiological model. Try to understand the origin and development of human behavior throughout its history.

The idea behind this discipline is that, if the remains are taken, especially trousseau, cave paintings and jewels from primitive cultures, can be interpreted as behavior, a behavior that, behind it, had to be symbolic capacities, product of all cognitive processing. This mental processing had to occur in response to external stimuli to the individual, both social (family, other members of the group and members of other groups) or environmental (changes in the climate, scarce food ...) that they feel or receive from the environment where they are it lives.

Voluntary human behavior and thought 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 picture 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 human beings was painting a wildebeest on a wall or making a necklace of bones, 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 in that area there were those animals or that they 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 starts from the idea that you can know the type of thinking that should have prehistoric people, the truth is that this can never be known one hundred percent reliable.

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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 their own knowledge from both health and social sciences, such as evolutionary biology, neurology, psychology, and sociology.

When studying and making hypotheses about the evolution of human thought and symbolic capacity, the following aspects are taken into account:

1. Evolutionary level

At the evolutionary level, they are taken into account the anatomical features of fossils of different Homo sapiens.

The evolutionary process is progressive, rarely sudden. This means that overnight we did not go from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, but there was a whole gradual process that involved changes in anatomical characteristics, including speech apparatus and capacity cranial.

Our species has changed anatomically over the millennia, and that 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 its cognitive capacities.

2. Neurological characteristics

Related to the previous point, the human brain has been the result of a long and continuous evolutionary process, which It has contributed to its acquiring a larger size and more folds to increase its surface.

This, together with improvements in the speech apparatus thanks to bipedalism, has been what has been able to harbor the symbolic capacity, which is the basis for thought and language.

Thanks to this symbolic capacity, the human being has been able to create abstract concepts, in addition to leaving the space-time immediacy, that is, to stop 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 the children who go to school today, were influenced by external factors, this is their environment and society. This is what would give them a qualitative difference intellectually speaking.

Members who grew up in a particular group were influenced by it in the form of culture, actively participating in it: they participated in rites, buried their dead according to how other fellow men did, used paint and body accessories ...

In cognitive archeology it has been tried to see regional differences between groups of Homo sapiens primal 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 the language, the human being is able to use his intelligence to solve cultural problems or social.

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 the first humans from their fossil remains and tools.. Is it possible to know in a totally safe way how human cognitive capacities evolved from what they left behind?

As we were already saying, the idea behind this discipline is that by analyzing both cultural remains and bones of the first human beings it is possible, through inferences, to know what their capacity should be symbolic. In addition, this is done by relating it to current primitive cultures, that is, tribal cultures, some of they are grappled, which are presumed to live in a very similar way to how prehistoric cultures should have. It can 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 by early humans is a clue to how they might think, there is really no guarantee that they would give them the function that is modernly attributed to them.

Bibliographic references:

• Rivera-Arrizabalaga, Á. (2005), Cognitive Archeology: Origin of human symbolism, Madrid: Arco Libros. ISBN 84-7635-623-4
• Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P. (1998), Archeology. Key concepts, Madrid: Ediciones Akal. ISBN 84-460-0234-5
• Gamble, C. (2002), Basic Archeology, Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel. ISBN 978-84-344-6679-1