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Neanderthal Cognitive Equivalence: Epistemological Problems and a Critical Analysis from Radical Embodiment

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Neanderthal Cognitive Equivalence: Epistemological Problems and a Critical Analysis from Radical Embodiment Neanderthal cognitive equivalence: epistemological problems and a critical analysis from radical embodiment Dissertation der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) vorgelegt von Duilio Garofoli aus Rom/Italien Tübingen 2015 Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Tag der mündlichen Qualifikation: 07.07.2015 Dekan: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rosenstiel 1. Berichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Katerina Harvati 2. Berichterstatter: PD Dr. Miriam Noël Haidle ii Table of Contents Summary ......................................................................................................................................................... 1 Zusammenfassung ....................................................................................................................................... 2 List of publications in the thesis .............................................................................................................. 3 A. Accepted works ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Personal contribution .................................................................................................................................. 4 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 4 2. Behavioral modernity and cognitive equivalence ........................................................................... 7 2.1 - The "human revolution" model ......................................................................................................... 9 2.2 - Early modern human cognitive equivalence ................................................................................ 10 2.3 - Neanderthal cognitive equivalence ............................................................................................... 11 2.4 - Cognitive pluralism .......................................................................................................................... 16 3. Objectives ................................................................................................................................................ 17 4. Results and discussion: epistemology ............................................................................................ 18 4.1 - Holistic mapping ............................................................................................................................... 18 4.2 - Behavioral modernity ...................................................................................................................... 20 4.3 - Behavioral modernity eliminativism ............................................................................................... 21 4.4 - Neanderthal cognitive equivalence: epistemological problems ................................................ 22 4.5 - The "intuitionist" fallacy ................................................................................................................... 22 4.6 - Circularity of the cognitive explanations ....................................................................................... 23 4.7 - A behaviorist problem ..................................................................................................................... 23 4.8 - Upper Palaeolithic derivate behaviors .......................................................................................... 24 4.9 - Incommensurability .......................................................................................................................... 24 5. A radical embodied critique ................................................................................................................ 26 5.1 - The "gannet approach" ................................................................................................................... 26 5.2 - Radical embodied ornaments ........................................................................................................ 28 5.3 - Key results ........................................................................................................................................ 29 5.4 - Body ornaments and Neanderthal cognitive equivalence ......................................................... 30 6. Cognitive architecture: a preliminary analysis .............................................................................. 31 7. Cognitive becoming .............................................................................................................................. 32 7.1 - Material engagement ...................................................................................................................... 32 7.2 - Biological constraints to cognitive transformation ....................................................................... 34 8. Conclusions and future developments ............................................................................................ 36 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................................... 38 References.................................................................................................................................................... 39 iii Appendices .................................................................................................................................................. 56 A. Accepted works A.1.................................................................................................................Garofoli & Haidle (2014) A.2..............................................................................................................................Garofoli (2013a) A.3..................................................................................................................Garofoli (forthcoming a) A.4..................................................................................................................Garofoli (forthcoming b) A.5..............................................................................................................................Garofoli (2013b) iv Summary The emergence of early body ornaments in the archaeological record of late Neanderthal populations in Europe has been considered to be proof of cognitive equivalence between Neanderthals and modern humans. However, these conclusions are reached through the adoption of a non-analytic method. A notion of behavioral modernity is indeed used to classify some behaviors in the archaeological record and intuitively connect these practices to cognitive modernity. The current thesis raises epistemological and metaphysical arguments against the use of behavioral modernity in cognitive archaeology, arguing for abandoning this notion in this field. A new methodology for the rational validation of theories, named holistic mapping, it is proposed to overcome problems with the current methodological approaches. Grounded in a combination of conditional/processual cognitive archaeology and the post-processual interpretive approach, holistic mapping focuses on the idea that inferences between the archaeological record and the cognitive level must result from an analytic process constituted by two stages. First, behavioral practices reconstructed from the record are mapped onto the minimal cognitive conditions required to produce them. Second, theoretical alternatives thus generated are selected by evaluating their stability within a network of theories concerning the entire behavioral repertoire of a target hominin species. These conditional principles are applied here to the production of shell-bead body ornaments. Conceptual tools from radical embodied cognitive science are adopted to show that these body ornaments do not necessarily require presumable signature properties of modern cognition. Indeed, direct social perception informed by context-related memories shows capable of explaining these ornaments without tapping into high-level mindreading or abstract conceptualization. Furthermore, preliminary analyses based on Barnard´s (2010a) Interacting cognitive subsystems model show that the radical embodied abilities reported here are compatible with a primitive mental architecture. Material engagement theory (Malafouris, 2013) is used to argue that the emergence of fully symbolic ornaments and meta-representational abilities necessarily require the engagement with non-symbolic material scaffolds to be brought forth. The absence of clear evidence for such a scaffolding in Neanderthal material culture impedes to consider early body ornaments as symbols and in turn as proof of high-level mentalistic abilities. It is concluded that early body ornaments are currently unable to rule out the existence of cognitive differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. 1 Zusammenfassung Das frühe Auftreten von Körperschmuck in den archäologischen Hinterlassenschaften später Neandertaler-Populationen in Europa wurde als Beleg kognitiver Äquivalenz zwischen Neandertalern und modernen Menschen gewertet. Diese Annahme gründet jedoch auf der Verwendung nicht-analytischer Methoden. Vielmehr wird ein Begriff modernen Verhaltens benutzt um bestimmte Verhaltensweisen im
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