British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
Fragmenting hominins and the presencing of Early Palaeolithic social worlds
John Chapman (Durham)
In this contribution, I introduce the fragmentation premise – the idea that a common practice in the past was the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects 'after the break'. I also summarise the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. To the extent that the boundaries of the human body can be considered permeable and open to the influences of other persons, things and places, personhood can be conceptualised as 'fractal', with objects emerging out of persons rather than in contra-distinction to persons and broken objects considered as non-human dividuals. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world – the hominin tools of the period 2.5–1 million years ago. In contrast to the standard separation of symbolic behaviour by anatomically modern humans after 200,000 years ago from non-symbolic behaviour by early pre-sapiens populations, I propose a scenario in which the use of tools and the movement of lithic resources over the landscape led to the emergence of enchained social relations, consonant with increases in brain size following 2 million years ago. Following the philosopher David Bohm, I further support the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects and link Bohm's 3-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution.