Originally Posted by
Smith, Fred H., and James C. Ahern. The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered. pp. 371-372. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
A Focus on Processes: Was There a Human Revolution?
There is a long-standing debate over the causes and significance of the so-called “human
revolution” in Europe—the “explosion” of expressions of symbolic behavior and complex
social relationships manifested in the Upper Paleolithic archeological record (Soffer, 1992,
1994; R. White, 1982, 1989). While some workers see the “human revolution” as cultural
change within a species (Clark, 2002; Wolpoff et al., 2004), others believe it represents the
biologically based cognitive superiority of modern humans. The problem is, that as traditionally
described, anatomical modernity predates behavioral modernity. Some advocates
of a biological basis for behavioral modernity (e.g., Klein, 2008) attribute it to a neural
change linked to human language some 50,000 years ago that doesn’t manifest itself anatomically;
others see it as a latent potential of modern humans.16 However, these innovations
of the Upper Paleolithic can alternatively be understood as a consequence of demographic
influence, expanding human populations, without requiring an explanation based on
biological changes in cognitive capacity. Moreover, there is considerable debate over whether
a human revolution actually exists at all.
Various trait lists defining “modernity” have been critically assessed by Henshilwood and
Marean (2003 and in the Current Anthropology commentary following). Recently, the very
idea of any single trait list signifying modernity has been undermined by the 2000 publication
of “The Revolution that Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human
Behaviour” by S. McBrearty and S. A. Brooks. While hold-outs reflecting Howell’s position
remain (for instance, Mellars from [at least] 1973 to Mellars and French, 2011, and many
others), this shifted much of the discussion to the African continent and emphasized the
gradual and seemingly independent African appearances of many of the modern behaviors
later found together in the European Upper Paleolithic. These African appearances differed
from the European Upper Paleolithic in that they occurred over a much longer period of
time and were ephemeral, sporadically appearing and disappearing at different times and
places within the Middle Stone Age. Whatever modernity entailed in the archaeological
record, it could no longer be considered as a single event.
If the behaviors of the European Upper Paleolithic are not so distinctly different from
behaviors of earlier Africans, the other side of the coin is that modern elements have also
been identified in the archaeological record of European Neandertals (Caron et al., 2011;
d’Errico et al., 2003; Morin and Laroulandie, 2012; Peresani et al., 2011; Roebroeks et al.,
2012; Teyssandier, 2008; Zilhão, 2007, 2011; Zilhão et al., 2006) and other archaic Eurasian
populations (Hovers and Belfer-Cohen, 2006). In the framework promoted by these and
other workers, it is far from clear whether Neandertal archaeology has always been correctly
interpreted.17 Primarily European observations of modern behavioral elements associated with Neandertals continue to appear in the literature; some show continuity with later
Upper Paleolithic industries, others indicate early, unconnected appearances of evidences
for modern behavior, often at the same time similar modern behavioral elements appeared
in Africa (as in Roebroeks and colleagues’ [2012] discovery of an early [200–250 kya] use of
red ochre pigmentation). All of this evidence also helps undercut the contention of a
“human revolution” accounting for the different behaviors of the Neandertal and Upper
Paleolithic peoples in Europe (Zilhão, 2011), a tradition of skepticism embodied in the
writings
of d’Errico and Zilhão separately (d’Errico, 2003; d’Errico et al., 2001, 2003; Zilhão
2006b, 2007, 2011) and together (Zilhão et al., 2006). Combined with the African data, this
indicates that meanings of behavioral modernity are complex and that processes accounting
for its appearance are unlikely to be biological.
It is increasingly clear that this is not the modernity of Howells (1969). The attributes
associated with modern behavior likely do not have a single origin; as cited above, they
appeared ephemerally both in African Middle Stone Age assemblages and in some
Neandertal contexts and likely will be found more broadly around the world. Wobst (1976)
argues that modernity may appear to have dispersed from a single origin, even if it actually
emerged gradually in many regions. Wobst’s view is that the perception of a single origin and
subsequent spread of modernity is a creation of the archaeological record. He demonstrates
that the appearance of punctuation is inevitable in a model predicated on gradualism: if we
assume modernity appeared gradually, we may expect to find what he calls a “cone of
modernity” created by viewing the past from the cone’s base in the present. Because of preservation
bias, more ancient time slices produce smaller and smaller samples of things that
are modern, until there is an earliest. Such a cone would give the illusion that modernity had
a single origin in Africa, where there were more people and therefore more evidence of
modern traits. But the increasing presence of modern artifacts when approaching the present
does not necessarily mean that modernity spread from a single point of origin (its earliest
appearance in the record); on the contrary, this would violate the predicating assumption
of the model that modernity arose gradually.
Wobst (1977) also discusses social reasons why stylistic changes in (or the attachment of
style to) classes of artifacts may appear abruptly once those artifacts become vehicles for
social signaling. Many of the features of behavioral modernity may be linked to information
exchange within and between groups, conveying broad information to recipients about
identity,
ownership, authorship, proscription and prescription, religion, and potentially
other variables. Intended recipients should be socially distant (so that conversation was not
common) but not so remote that they wouldn’t be able to decode the messages. Wobst argues
that style, the attachment of such cultural messages to classes of artifacts, will “appear”
revolutionary
largely because of dangers of miscommunication. Once meaning is attached,
style should quickly pervade that class of material culture, and one should expect relative
uniformity within a social group; as Wobst argues using examples from mid-twentieth-century
Yugoslavia, the dangers of being associated with the wrong social group, or inadvertently
sending the wrong message, force rapid conformity of dress (in this case headdresses)
within groups. Ultimately, as discussed below, demographic factors, especially population
expansion, would increase the number of individuals in and relations between these distant
but not-too-remote social groups, potentially leading to the intentional use of artifacts for
information exchange and the appearance of a cultural revolution.
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