The Finished Artefact Fallacy: Acheulean Hand-axes and Language Origins

Abstract

Approaches to the study of the origins of language have three major sources of evidence: (1) from modern humans, including psychology and linguistics; (2)from modern non-human primates, including their communicative abilities; (3) from archaeology. This chapter is about the third of these - the archaeological evidence of what actually happened. Ten years ago, I outlined problems with the traditional framework of understanding stone tools (Davidson and Noble 1993; Gibson and Ingold 1993). In this chapter, i will return to issues I raised on that occasion and present more evidence and argument about Acheulean hand-axes.