Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 21, 2012
Marked changes in human dispersal and development during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transiti... more Marked changes in human dispersal and development during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition have been attributed to massive volcanic eruption and/or severe climatic deterioration. We test this concept using records of volcanic ash layers of the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption dated to ca. 40,000 y ago (40 ka B.P.). The distribution of the Campanian Ignimbrite has been enhanced by the discovery of cryptotephra deposits (volcanic ash layers that are not visible to the naked eye) in archaeological cave sequences. They enable us to synchronize archaeological and paleoclimatic records through the period of transition from Neanderthal to the earliest anatomically modern human populations in Europe. Our results confirm that the combined effects of a major volcanic eruption and severe climatic cooling failed to have lasting impacts on Neanderthals or early modern humans in Europe. We infer that modern humans proved a greater competitive threat to indigenous populations than natural di...
... Tillier, cited in Ronen i982:3I5), Darra-i-kur (Angel I972), Skhfil (McCown and Keith I939; T... more ... Tillier, cited in Ronen i982:3I5), Darra-i-kur (Angel I972), Skhfil (McCown and Keith I939; Trinkaus i982, i984, i986), and Qafzeh (Bar-Yosef and Vandermeersch I98I) in southwestern Asia; Dar es-Soltane (Debenath I975, Trinkaus I986) and Temara (Ferembach I976) in North ...
Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middl... more Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middle Paleolithic are examined geoar-chaeologically. Cave geomorphology, sedimentology, and taphonomy form the basis for a reexamination of the Neandertal discoveries most often cited in this ...
Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size o... more Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size of the brain during human evolution to infer cognitive and social outcomes. Archaeologists have applied similar reasoning to the development of technology in deep history. This paper goes beyond these approaches by considering the house as a metaphor for the structure of hominin minds. It is argued that the study of the mind in deep history requires, (1) a recognition that mind is distributed between bodies, brains, and the world. The implications are examined through a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study (that unwraps the cerebellum and which suggests that folding rather than cortex size may be more important for understanding cognition.; (2) unmasking the ingrained container-habitus that has been used to describe and investigate minds either in the present or deep past. This bias is explored by entering the eccentric house-mind of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) with its many compartments...
To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestr... more To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition — the social brain — in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches — the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool use provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during t...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 21, 2012
Marked changes in human dispersal and development during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transiti... more Marked changes in human dispersal and development during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition have been attributed to massive volcanic eruption and/or severe climatic deterioration. We test this concept using records of volcanic ash layers of the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption dated to ca. 40,000 y ago (40 ka B.P.). The distribution of the Campanian Ignimbrite has been enhanced by the discovery of cryptotephra deposits (volcanic ash layers that are not visible to the naked eye) in archaeological cave sequences. They enable us to synchronize archaeological and paleoclimatic records through the period of transition from Neanderthal to the earliest anatomically modern human populations in Europe. Our results confirm that the combined effects of a major volcanic eruption and severe climatic cooling failed to have lasting impacts on Neanderthals or early modern humans in Europe. We infer that modern humans proved a greater competitive threat to indigenous populations than natural di...
... Tillier, cited in Ronen i982:3I5), Darra-i-kur (Angel I972), Skhfil (McCown and Keith I939; T... more ... Tillier, cited in Ronen i982:3I5), Darra-i-kur (Angel I972), Skhfil (McCown and Keith I939; Trinkaus i982, i984, i986), and Qafzeh (Bar-Yosef and Vandermeersch I98I) in southwestern Asia; Dar es-Soltane (Debenath I975, Trinkaus I986) and Temara (Ferembach I976) in North ...
Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middl... more Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middle Paleolithic are examined geoar-chaeologically. Cave geomorphology, sedimentology, and taphonomy form the basis for a reexamination of the Neandertal discoveries most often cited in this ...
Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size o... more Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size of the brain during human evolution to infer cognitive and social outcomes. Archaeologists have applied similar reasoning to the development of technology in deep history. This paper goes beyond these approaches by considering the house as a metaphor for the structure of hominin minds. It is argued that the study of the mind in deep history requires, (1) a recognition that mind is distributed between bodies, brains, and the world. The implications are examined through a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study (that unwraps the cerebellum and which suggests that folding rather than cortex size may be more important for understanding cognition.; (2) unmasking the ingrained container-habitus that has been used to describe and investigate minds either in the present or deep past. This bias is explored by entering the eccentric house-mind of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) with its many compartments...
To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestr... more To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition — the social brain — in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches — the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool use provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during t...
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Papers by Clive Gamble