Renfrew’s sapient paradox refers to the perceived absence of “complex” cultural materiality from around 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans first appeared, up until the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic when artefacts ostensibly underwent a sudden enrichment that presaged the settled communities of the Holocene.  Over the past two decades, archaeological finds from southern Africa and, to a lesser extent, other diverse areas have led to a reassessment of this timeline that suggests the existence of cultural complexity at least 100,000 BP.  Recent evidence from the perspective of embodied material engagement can potentially help provide novel insights into the southern African corpus.  This presentation will explore the archaeological record in the light of these discoveries by showing how material engagement relates to the unfolding of cognitive evolution. This will involve presenting evidence from neuroscience and cultural evolution by showing how these disciplines can usefully help to understand the significance of specific artefacts deriving from the southern African context.

Contact:

Derek Hodgson, University of York, Department of Archaeology