Project description
How our use of symbols has evolved over thousands of years
To understand the path humans took in their evolution, it is necessary to acknowledge their special ability and capacity to learn to use symbols and to respond to a system of symbols. Despite progress, there is still much to learn about past symbolic behaviour and how it evolved. The EU-funded SYMb project will explore early symbolic evolution using experimental methods from the cognitive sciences. In a first-of-its-kind study, it will test hypotheses about human symbolic behaviour involving artefacts from at least six archaeological sites dating back 150 000 to 12 000 years. Ultimately, the project aims to examine and explain early human symbolic behaviour.
Objective
Understanding the unique evolutionary trajectory taken by the human species is impossible without appreciation of our special capacities for symbolic cognition and behavior. But how did these capacities evolve during the late Middle Palaeolithic? Within only the last couple of decades, early milestones in human symbolic behavior have been continuously revised as new excavations across the globe challenge previous long-held assumption. However, at the same time we have made little progress in our understanding of past symbolic behaviour and the mechanisms by which it evolved. As tools of the mind, symbols are constituted by the intangible cognitive processes they evoke in pragmatic use contexts, which are inaccessible to the standard methods of archaeology or genetics. With eSYMb, I will establish a novel integrative framework for the systematic investigation of early symbolic evolution directly frontloading records from archaeology in experimental investigations and computational modelling based on state-of-the-art methods from the cognitive sciences. Starting from the assumption that symbolic artefacts evolve adaptively over time to better fulfil their intended functions, I will investigate these structural changes and their cognitive implications to inform inferences about their past use. The framework will thus establish transparent, data-driven methods and criteria to test – for the first time - concrete hypotheses about early human symbolic behaviour from 6+ archaeological sites from the late Middle and early Upper Palaeolithic (~150.000 – 12.000 years ago) based on measures critical to symbolic cognition and behaviour. In summary, the objective of eSYMb is to bring systematic scientific rigour to the investigation and interpretation of early human symbolic behaviour particularly from.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedHost institution
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark