Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

The emergence of symbolic behavior is often considered a hallmark development in hominin evolution, ultimately giving rise to the complex communicative practices, abstract reasoning patterns, aesthetic discourses and religious institutions surrounding us today. In recent years, archaeologists have provided substantial evidence for the remarkable time-depth of symbolic artifact utilization and have made groundbreaking methodological advances (e.g, with respect to dating techniques, microscopy and 3d modeling). However, a systematic and rigorous framework for the investigation of the symbolic function of past artifacts is still lacking, that is, what kind of purpose these tools may have served and what kind of symbolic work they were designed or co- opted to do. This paper responds to this lacuna and outlines a new conceptual framework for the investigation of early symbolic artifacts. Symbolic artifacts are special in the sense of being mind- directed as they do their work primarily in the social and cognitive domain. That is, they support their function only to the extent that their structural properties affect relevant cognitive processes related to symbolic cognition (including e.g., attention, memory, and discrimination). To inform our understanding of past symbolic behavior, we therefore introduce the concept of cognitive affordances, defined as the capacity of symbolic forms to support such relevant cognitive processes. The cognitive affordances constitute a mediating layer of analysis between the observable, structural traits of symbolic artifacts and their hypothesized role in past social and pragmatic behaviors of hominins, related to, for instance, aesthetic, communicative, or ritual/cosmological practices. We show that by studying the cognitive implications of variation and change in the structural properties of symbolic artifacts recovered from the archaeological record, we can inform inferences and test new hypotheses about what pragmatic functions they may have served in past Paleolithic society.