Is early silcrete heat treatment a new behavioural proxy in the Middle Stone Age?
Is early silcrete heat treatment a new behavioural proxy in the Middle Stone Age?
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0204705
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Schmidt P
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Stolarczyk RE;Schmidt P
近年来，南非中石器时代（MSA）对于我们理解“现代人类行为”的出现变得越来越重要。一些关键的创新首次出现在这种背景下，其时间明显早于欧洲旧石器时代晚期的重新发明。其中一项创新是对石材进行热处理，以提高其生产石器的质量。热处理甚至可能是最古老的有据可查的技术，用于有意改变材料的一般性能。人们普遍认为，它需要熟练的用火、高度的计划深度和复杂的认知能力。然而，为了研究这些基本概念，我们需要分析用于热处理的技术和程序，并且需要了解它们的含义。在本文中，我们通过在所谓的认知图中对设置所需的行为进行编码，对四种替代热处理程序的技术复杂性进行了直接而便捷的比较，认知图是一种基于问题-解决方案距离来理解复杂性的相对较新的方法。我们的结果表明，尽管这些技术在复杂性上存在显着差异，但 MSA 中使用的技术属于其他 MSA 技术已知的复杂性范围内。正如南非这一时期所采用的那样，地上火灾的热处理在其发明时甚至是最复杂的技术之一。因此，早期热处理可以被认为是一个重要的行为指标，可以揭示过去群体的行为和社会经济结构。关于非洲早期解剖学现代人类的“现代性”、“行为灵活性”和“复杂认知”的持续争论凸显了这一点的含义。
The South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) has in recent years become increasingly important for our understanding of the emergence of ‘modern human behaviours’. Several key innovations appeared in this context for the first time, significantly pre-dating their re-invention in the European Upper Palaeolithic. One of these innovations was heat treatment of stone to improve its quality for the production of stone tools. Heat treatment may even be the oldest well-documented technique used to intentionally alter the properties of materials in general. It is commonly thought of as requiring the skilled use of fire, a high degree of planning depth and complex cognitive abilities. However, to work on these fundamental concepts we need to analyse the techniques and procedures used to heat-treat and we need to understand what they imply. In this paper, we present a direct and expedient comparison between the technical complexities of four alternative heat treatment procedures by coding the behaviours required for their set-up in so-called cognigrams, a relatively new method for understanding complexity based on the problem-solution distance. Our results show that although the techniques significantly differ in complexity, the techniques used in the MSA fall within the range of complexities known from other MSA techniques. Heat treatment in above-ground fires, as it was practised during this period in South Africa, was even one of the most complex techniques at the time of its invention. Early heat treatment can therefore be considered an important behavioural proxy that may shed light on the behaviour and socioeconomic structure of past groups. The implications of this are highlighted by the ongoing debate about ‘modernity’, ‘behavioural flexibility’ and ‘complex cognition’ of early anatomically modern humans in Africa.
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1016868108
发表时间：
2011-01-11
影响因子：
11.1
作者：
Henry, Amanda G.;Brooks, Alison S.;Piperno, Dolores R.
通讯作者：
Piperno, Dolores R.
影响因子：
3.2
作者：
d'Errico, F;Henshilwood, C;van Niekerk, K
通讯作者：
van Niekerk, K
影响因子：
2.8
作者：
Charrie-Duhaut, Armelle;Porraz, Guillaume;Texier, Pierre-Jean
通讯作者：
Texier, Pierre-Jean
影响因子：
2.8
作者：
Henrich, J
通讯作者：
Henrich, J
影响因子：
56.9
作者：
Brown, Kyle S.;Marean, Curtis W.;Bernatchez, Jocelyn
通讯作者：
Bernatchez, Jocelyn