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"Gowlett, John"
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On questions surrounding the Acheulean 'tradition'
The Acheulean, sometimes known as 'the great handaxe tradition', is the longest-lasting entity in the human cultural record. The oldest sites are in Africa at around 1.6 million years ago and the most recent approach the last 100,000 years. The geographical extent is also enormous, ranging across Africa, the Middle East, most of Europe and large parts of Asia. Is it however a real tradition? The Acheulean represents a set of stone-working ideas that endure, but the strength of 'tradition' is often an assumption made by archaeologists. This paper re-examines Acheulean biface variation, looking at sets of assemblages measured in different ways, but amenable to discriminant analysis (DFA), which is able to highlight differences useful in classification. The analyses show significant differences between European and African assemblages. In the case of the Far East, in line with others, we provide further analyses suggestive of technological differences between putative 'handaxes' from Korea and some 'classic' western assemblages. However, it is not yet fully clear how far a 'typical' Acheulean tradition is represented, as matching of Far Eastern assemblages to other parts of the world depends to an extent upon the criteria used. With regard to the more general Acheulean paradox, the paper notes parallels in biological studies with the idea that a single widely extending phenomenon can incorporate elements of both unity and diversity.
Journal Article
Thinking big : how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind
When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language or art, music and dance evolve? It is the contention of this pathbreaking and provocative book that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances the ability to think big that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind.
Book
Archaeological sciences 1995
A huge collection of papers on scientific analysis in archaeology from a conference held in Liverpool in 1995.
eBook
Thinking big : how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind
When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language or art, music and dance evolve? It is the contention of this pathbreaking and provocative book that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances the ability to think big that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. This social brain hypothesis, put forward by evolutionary psychologists such as Robin Dunbar, one of the authors of this book, can be tested against archaeological and fossil evidence, as archaeologists Clive Gamble and John Gowlett show in the second part of Thinking Big. Along the way, the three authors touch on subjects as diverse and diverting as the switch from finger-tip grooming to vocal grooming or the crucial importance of making fire for the lengthening of the social day. Ultimately, the social worlds we inhabit today can be traced back to our Stone Age ancestors.
Book
Human Evolution and the Archaeology of the Social Brain
The picture of human evolution has been transformed by new evidence in recent years, but contributing disciplines seem to have difficulty in sharing knowledge on a common basis. The disciplines producing primary data in paleoanthropology scarcely reach out to a broader picture and are often bypassed by writers in other disciplines. Archaeology is encouraged by its material evidence to project a view that “what you see is what there was”: by definition, there can be only a late flowering of human abilities. Yet there is a vital alternative paleontological record of the early hominins that gives us important information about their brains and suggests that brains become large and complex far earlier than that late material complexity might imply. How, then, to account for the large brains acting far back in time? Evolutionary psychology, in the form of the social brain hypothesis, claims that these large brains were concerned with managing a far-reaching social life. In becoming human, those brains did not merely become larger, but of necessity they took on new socialized perspectives, a domestication of emotional capacities allowing greater insights and collaboration. We argue that there is at least a 2-million-year social record that must be made part of mainstream interpretation.
Journal Article
Landscapes of Human Evolution
Fourteen papers are presented here in honour of John Gowlett. John has a wide range of research interests primarily focused on the human genus Homo and is a world leader in understanding the cognitive and behavioural preconditions necessary for the emergence of complex behaviours such as language and art.
eBook
The Social Brain and the Shape of the Palaeolithic
It is often the case in interdisciplinary accounts of human evolution that archaeological data are either ignored or treated superficially. This article sets out to redress this position by using archaeological evidence from the last 2.5 million years to test the social brain hypothesis (SBH) – that our social lives drove encephalization. To do this we construct a map of our evolving social complexity that concentrates on two resources – materials and emotions – that lie at the basis of all social interaction. In particular, novel cultural and biological mechanisms are seen as evolutionary responses to problems of cognitive load arising from the need to integrate more individuals and sub-units into the larger communities predicted by the SBH. The Palaeolithic evidence for the amplification of these twin resources into novel social forms is then evaluated. Here the SBH is used to differentiate three temporal movements (2.6–1.6 Ma, 1.5–0.4 Ma and 300–25 ka) and their varied evolutionary responses are described in detail. Attention is drawn to the second movement where there is an apparent disconnect between a rise in encephalization and a stasis in material culture. This disconnect is used to discuss the co-evolutionary relationship that existed between materials and emotions to solve cognitive problems but which, at different times, amplified one resource rather than the other. We conclude that the shape of the Palaeolithic is best conceived as a gradient of change rather than a set of step-like revolutions in society and culture.
Journal Article
Out in the cold
Humans are very adaptable: during the last ice age, they apparently lived within the Arctic Circle. The discovery suggests that, although, cold, the region was probably not covered in ice at the time.
Journal Article
