Modern Human Origins: Do We Know What We're Looking For?

As proxies for the emergence of "modern human behavior," archaeologists typically rely on changes in technological complexity and/or the first appearance of symbolic items or practices. In this paper, I examine both approaches and conclude that neither, as currently envisioned, is likely to provide the answers archaeologists seek. Technological complexity is always a work in progress, and deciding where to place the boundary between "pre-modern" and "modern" is arbitrary. The symbolic approach is better suited to the task but problematic nonetheless, because archaeologists focus only on objects or practices that had no evident utilitarian function. That assumption flies in the face of ethnographic reality. Traditional Indigenous peoples see symbolic meanings in almost everything in their world, whether utilitarian or not, mundane or special, animate or inanimate, natural or supernatural. The hearth, smoke, cardinal directions, colors, plants, animals, water, wind, clouds, rain, thunder, lightning, minerals, even toolstone, all are viewed as sentient, volitional spirit-beings with human-like temperaments, needs, and expectations. Importantly, this worldview introduces spiritually motivated behaviors and constraints that have real world causal agency. Why should we assume that the first time a few peoples scattered across Eurasia or Africa decided to wear ornaments or paint cave walls conveniently coincided with the first time human beings possessed the cognitive capacity for symbolic behavior? A deeply spiritual worldview could have emerged millennia earlier, but saw its expression in other domains of material culture or phenomena, including those that archaeologists routinely dismiss as utterly mundane and utilitarian. I suggest that technological complexity cannot resolve the modernity issue, and that the current focus on symbolism expressed exclusively in non-utilitarian objects and practices is far too narrow and fails to recognize the pervasive nature of spiritualism in traditional societies. I offer what I believe is a more anthropologically sound research paradigm for exploring the origins of modern human behavior, and some admittedly very preliminary suggestions for a way forward.