Opening the Door, Pointing the Way

Abstract

Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture (1994) represented his mature and original thinking on the essential nature of neolithisation. While the book continues to infl uence the thought and work of many, its impact is diminished because Jacques Cauvin left two major questions unanswered. My own research has been directed to investigating those questions : Cauvin described his “ révolution des symboles” as “ psycho-cultural”, but he said little about its cognitive and cultural nature ; and he repeated the question with which R. Braidwood had challenged us – to explain why (in Braidwood’s case) hunter-gatherers had turned to farming at that particular time, and why not earlier. My work has been directed at developing an understanding of the cognitive and cultural implications of the use of systems of symbolic representation in material form ; and at setting the emergence of those cognitive skills in the context of theories of the evolution of human cultural communication. However, we have made little progress along the way that Cauvin pointed us. Despite rapid and exciting strides in theories about the human mind and the cognitive evolution of human social and communication skills, inter-disciplinary collaboration with archaeologists has placed the climax of the story in the Upper Palaeolithic ; the Neolithic has been either ignored or seen as no more than a consequence of a “ human revolution” that was achieved more than 30,000 years ago. In order to progress, we need to form new inter-disciplinary collaborations that will investigate the cognitive and symbolic cultural aspects of the Neolithic.

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