British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
Technologies of separation and the evolution of social extension
Clive Gamble (RHUL)
The ability to extend social relations across time and space is a hallmark of the human community. However, the timing of this distinguishing feature is poorly understood as is the role of material culture in the evolutionary process. Attention has focused on the cultural changes evident with the Human (c.100,000 years ago) and Neolithic (c.10,000 years ago) revolutions and claims have been advanced that both events mark the appearance of 'modern minds' capable of social extension and complexity based on the manipulation of symbols. In this paper I will question such standpoints where modernity is invariably deferred and always seen as an attribute of Homo sapiens. I will concentrate instead on the encephalisation event that occurs between 600,000 and 400,000 years ago and explore the implications of the social brain hypothesis for the extension of the social lives of earlier hominins. I will re-visit the importance of emotions as the core around which varied hominin societies were scaffolded and examine how they came to be increasingly implicated with material culture though embodied concepts of containment. The results were technologies of separation that have been elaborated ever since to create the distinctive human community.