At its conclusion, the project has successfully delivered on its primary objective: to establish and validate a new, data-driven framework for investigating the evolution of early human symbolic behavior. This was achieved by systematically integrating archaeological records with state-of-the-art experimental and computational methods from the cognitive sciences. The main outcomes are:
- An integrative framework for cognitive archaeology defining symbols as culturally evolved cognitive tools. This framework, outlined in publications like Tylén et al. (2024), provides a robust blueprint for testing specific hypotheses about how ancient artifacts were created, perceived, and transmitted. The project pioneered a replicable methodology that combines archaeological evidence with controlled cognitive experiments and computational modeling.
- A validated experimental toolkit to investigate symbolic artifacts. We developed and applied a suite of novel experimental methods to move beyond qualitative interpretation (presented more generally in Wisher & Tylén, 2025 and in Tylén et al 2024). This toolkit includes transmission chain experiments to simulate how different functions (e.g. communication, social identity) shape cultural evolution, psychophysical experiments to test how formal features (e.g. orientation, abbreviation, clustering of traits, symmetries) impact cognitive processes such as perception, memory, recognition and aesthetic appreciation of the artifacts, and a serie of more exploratory techniques e.g. in eye-tracking to quantitatively measure attentional focus on prehistoric art; and extension of basic psychophysical studies across several primate species.
- Quantified links between form and function. The project demonstrated how computational methods can reveal deep evolutionary histories and functional constraints embedded in material culture. A key achievement was using phylogenetic and network analysis on a cross-cultural database of knots to show that an artifact's structural complexity systematically correlates with its function. This data-driven approach demonstrates how our approach can be integrated with large-scale computational analyses to uncover the evolutionary history of material culture and provides a powerful model for linking form to function in a wide range of symbolic systems.
- New insights into the drivers of symbolic evolution. Our research has significantly advanced the understanding of the mechanisms behind symbolic change. We have shown that the evolution of symbolic traditions cannot be explained by a single function but is rather shaped by a dynamic interplay of multiple pragmatic goals (e.g. aesthetics, group identity, communication), production constraints (e.g. motor skills, existing markings, cultural traditions), and fundamental cognitive biases.
