Culture: A Human Domain

TLDR

Recent primate and hominid studies have obscured key issues about human versus non‑human primate behavior, and the core problem of how humans organize experience and interact with their environment remains largely unaddressed. The authors propose a psychological framework to assess emergent human behavior, particularly tool‑making, using the fossil record. The framework defines arbitrary form and imposition, and analyzes tools through social‑psychological lenses of norm acquisition, perception, and structuring. The study finds that tool‑making and language share a common cognitive structure, that arbitrary form and imposition are uniquely human, and that symbolic tools foster social controls and division of labor in early hominids.

Abstract

It is argued that a number of recent writings based on primate studies and on analysis of early hominid evolution have blurred certain central issues regarding human and non-human primate behavior. The central problem of how man organizes his experience and how he interacts with his environment is seldom squarely faced. A framework is provided here which examines tool-making in terms of psychological processes. It is argued that both tool-making and language come out of the same cognitive structure. The framework attempts to provide a means by which the appearance of emergent human behavior may be gauged from the fossil record. Two attributes, arbitrary form and imposition, are defined. It is argued that these two dimensions are specific to the human psychological structure, and that stone tools made to any standardized form satisfy the requirements of emergence in cognitive structure. Tool-making is analyzed using models for language behavior, and strong parallels are shown with certain design features that are specific to human communication. Tools are then viewed from the perspective of social psychological frameworks relating to the acquisition of norms of reference, perception, and the passage of objects from an unstructured to structured condition. This analysis suggests that arbitrary symbols played a major part in the development of social controls adaptive for early hominids utilizing strategies of division of labor, since symbols produce invariant relationships that can be defined outside of strictly biological relationships.