The Nature of Culture: an eight-grade model for the evolution and expansion of cultural capacities in hominins and other animals.

Tracing the evolution of human culture through time is arguably one of the most controversial and complex scholarly endeavors, and a broad evolutionary analysis of how symbolic, linguistic, and cultural capacities emerged and developed in our species is lacking. Here we present a model that, in broad terms, aims to explain the evolution and portray the expansion of human cultural capacities (the EECC model), that can be used as a point of departure for further multidisciplinary discussion and more detailed investigation. The EECC model is designed to be flexible, and can be refined to accommodate future archaeological, paleoanthropological, genetic or evolutionary psychology/behavioral analyses and discoveries. Our proposed concept of cultural behavior differentiates between empirically traceable behavioral performances and behavioral capacities that are theoretical constructs. Based largely on archaeological data (the 'black box' that most directly opens up hominin cultural evolution), and on the extension of observable problem-solution distances, we identify eight grades of cultural capacity. Each of these grades is considered within evolutionary-biological and historical-social trajectories. Importantly, the model does not imply an inevitable progression, but focuses on expansion of cultural capacities based on the integration of earlier achievements. We conclude that there is not a single cultural capacity or a single set of abilities that enabled human culture; rather, several grades of cultural capacity in animals and hominins expanded during our evolution to shape who we are today.

Epistemological problems in Cognitive Archaeology: an anti-relativistic proposal towards methodological uniformity.

Cognitive archaeology (CA) has an inherent and major problem. The coupling between extinct minds, brains and behaviors cannot be investigated in a laboratory. Without direct testability, there is a risk that theories in CA will remain merely subjective opinions in which "anything goes". To counter this risk, opponents of relativism originally argued that CA should adopt a method of validation based on "indirectly" testing inferences from the archaeological record. In this paper, we will offer a two-part analysis. In the first part, we will discuss problems with the original anti-relativistic agenda. While we agree with the necessity of developing a rational methodology for this discipline, in our view previous analyses have significant weak points that need to be strengthened. In particular, we will propose that "indirect testability" should be superseded by a methodology based upon deductive mappings from networks of theories, followed by a plausibility-selection stage. This methodology will be implemented by adopting an extension of Barnard's (2010b) proposals for mapping hierarchical systems. In the second part, we will compare our methods with those currently adopted in the CA debate. From this analysis, it will emerge that some proposals in CA are inconsistent with our methodology and are incommensurable with those that are consistent with it. Furthermore, we will show that theories in CA can advance contradictory conclusions precisely because they have been developed using different methods. We conclude that a universal methodology, like that proposed here, is needed for CA to become more objective. It is also crucial for creating conditions for coherent and productive debate among different schools of thought in the field of cognitive evolution.