The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications by Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean

Abstract

Every ten years or so there seems to be an important synthesis about the evolution of human behaviour (see Mellars 1973, Dennell 1983, Gibson and Ingold 1993), and this paper seems likely to be important in the same decadal tradition. Over a period of nearly is years writing about the evolutionary emergence of language and its recognition in the archaeological record, Noble and I have covered several of the points raised in this paper. It is difficult not to agree with most of it, but I would place some emphases differently. Our 1991 paper (Noble and Davidson 1991) pointed out (p. 23) that "modern human morphology may be necessary, but is not sufficientto support language; hence the discovery of prehistoric skeletons having modern form does not constitute evidence that the behaviour of those creatures included language." Given the uncertainty about the attribution of skeletal remains to species (Collard and Wood 2000, Gibbs, Collard, and Wood 2000), the best evidence for modern human behaviour comes from the archaeological evidence supported by appropriate theory. While Henshilwood and Marean emphasize the archaeological evidence, they do not escape the biological trap altogether and seem to think that brain size alone may be an important feature.