1) The document discusses the coevolution of technology, cognition, culture, and organizations in humans over millions of years, from tool-using savanna apes to today's socio-technical organizations. 2) Around 5 million years ago, climate change forced forest-dwelling apes out of East Africa, selecting for increased brain capacity and cultural adaptation on the savanna. Tool use and social cooperation allowed hunting and scavenging of large prey. 3) By 3-2 million years ago, hominins' competitive scavenging and hunting reduced other carnivore populations in East Africa, establishing hominins as top carnivores. The spread of tool-using hominins like Homo erect

1. Understanding the origins of socio-technical
humans and their organizations (~Episode 5)
—
Coevolution of technology, cognition, culture and
organizations: working hypothesis
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Access my research papers supporting the work
from
Google Citations

2. Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation
a fugue on the theory of knowledge
 Hypertext book explores coevolution and revolutions
in human cognition and cognitive technologies leading
to the emergence of modern knowledge-based socio-
technical organizations as living entities
 Last episode explains how coevolution of cognition
and technologies enabled forest-dwelling apes to
become “human” and dominate the entire planet in
something like 5 my.
 Key discoveries over the last 2-3 years allow
construction of a complete evolutionary hypothesis
– Genomics
– Paleontology
– Paleoarchaeology
2
– Comparative biology
– Comparative ethology
– Cognitive science

3. 3
Book theme: Revolutions in material technology cause grade
shifts in the ecological nature of the human species
 M = millions, K = thousands, C = centuries,
D = decades, Y = years, (A = ago)
 Accelerating change in our material technologies:
– > 5 mya - Tool Making: sticks and stone tools plus fire (~ 1 mya)
extend human reach, diet and digestion
– ~ 11 kya- Agricultural Revolution: Ropes and digging implements
control and manage non–human organic metabolism
– ~ 3.5 ca - Industrial Revolution: extends/replaces human and
animal muscle power with inorganic mechanical power
– ~ 5 da - Microelectronics Revolution: extends human cognitive
capabilities with computers
– > 10 ya - Cyborg Revolution: convergence of human and machine
cognition with smartphones (today) and neural prosthetics
(tomorrow)

4. 4
Grade shifting revolutions in human technologies
repeatedly reinvent the nature of individual cognition
 Accelerating change in extending human cognition
– > 5 mya – Tacit transfer of tool-using/making knowledge begins
to add cultural inheritance to genetic inheritance
– ~ 1 mya - Emergence of speech for the direct transfer of
cultural knowledge between individuals
– ~ 11 kya – Invention of physical counters (11 K), writing and
reading (5 K) to record and transmit knowledge external to
human memory (technology to transfer culture)
– ~ 5.6 ca - printing and universal literacy transmit knowledge to
the masses (cultural use of technology)
– ~ 32 ya - computing tools actively manage corporate data/
knowledge externally to the human brain (32 Y) and personal
knowledge (World Wide Web - 18 Y)
– ~ 10 ya- smartphones merge human and technological cognition
(human & technological convergence)
– ~ Now: Emergence of human-machine cyborgs (wearable and
implanted technology becoming part of the human body)

5. Cognitive advances enable grade shifting revolutions in
cultural and organizational cognition
 Accelerating change in extending human cognition
– > 5 mya – social hunting/defence  cooperative foraging &
hunting
– ~ 1.0 mya - linguistically coordinated activities around
campfires form cohesive groups (mime, dancing, singing, story-
telling, myth, ritual)
– ~ 200 kya – mnemonic songlines apply ritual & method of loci to
landscapes to build & retain cultural memories
– ~ 12 kya – mnemonic guilds enable husbandry, settlement,
farming & economic specialization
– ~ 7 kya – tokens & writing enable bureaucratic cities & states
– ~ 6 ca – communications, coordination & rise of chartered
companies
– ~ 100 ya – instant communication & rise of transnationals
– ~ Now – emergence of global brains & global cognition5

6. Some recent milestone
publications constraining
the development of an
evolutionary hypothesis
explaining how this
happened

7. Critically informative species of Homo
 Dmanisi Georgia (Lordkipanidze et al. e.g.,
2013) - Variation in H. georgicus shows H. erectus,
ergaster, & probably also rudolfensis and habilis
form one chronospecies persisting through time
 erectus longest lived Homo, spread widely
through Africa and (via Dmanisi) Eurasia
 floresiensis (Hobbit) lived a few thousand
years ago on Flores (Indonesia) probably
derived from erectus (Kubo et al. 2013).
 Modern sibling species: analysis of highly
accurate genomes from modern sapiens and
Denisovans (Meyer et al. 2012) &
Neanderthals (Prüfer et al 2014) from
Denisova Cave, Altai Mountains, Siberia show
– Evolutionary divergence ~ 300 kya,
– Limited interbreeding with introgression
– Hybrid infertility sufficient for effective
isolation
7
Wood, B. 2012. Facing up to complexity. Nature 488, 162-
163 - http://tinyurl.com/k53ofwy.

8. Fossils (1.8 my) first hominins out of Africa –
ancestor/early Homo erectus
8
Lordkipanidze, D., et al. 2013. A complete skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the
evolutionary biology of early Homo. Science 342, 326-331
http://tinyurl.com/kbnwxnn.
Lordkipanidze, D., et al.
2005. The earliest
toothless hominin skull.
Nature 434, 717-718.
(Oct. 2013) 1.8 mya ~550-730 cc cranial
capacity, fully bipedal, scavanged or hunted
large game with Oldowan grade butchering
tools; first hominins out of Africa (Hertler
et al. 2013)
Individual had
been
toothless for
years before
death,
implying
strong social
support
network?

9. Latest genomics (5 my) establishes accurate genealogy, showing
bifurcations and interspecific hybridization
9
Prüfer, K., et al., Pääbo, S. 2014. The complete
genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai
Mountains. Nature 505, 43–49 –
http://tinyurl.com/lvg96n2.
Meyer, M., et al., Pääbo, S. 2014. A mitochondrial genome sequence of
a hominin from Sima de los Huesos. Nature 505, 403–406
- http://tinyurl.com/lv6z8xo
From 300-400 kya fossil Homo
Red arrows show inter-
specific hybridization with
introgression of genes and
proportion of genome
introgressed (Dec. 2013)
4500 kya
Shows stepwise genealogical derivation based on
sequence of single nucleotide mutations (Dec, 2013)

10. Eriksson A et al. PNAS 2012;109:16089-16094
 Genomic analysis shows all living
humans descended from people
living in the E or S Africa
some 70 kya. Eurasian
mDNA six steps derived
from oldest African
 Neanderthal/Denisovan
ancestor (anticessor /
heidelbergensis?) entered
Eurasia before sapiens
emigrants from Africa
 Except for genes surviving
from limited introgressive hybridization where they met Neanderthals &
Denisovans, African emigrants to Eurasia replaced all pre-existing
hominins including the wide-spread H. erectus that entered Eurasia by
1.8 mya.
Hominins exiting the East African homeland
10
Behar 2008; Cruciani et al. 2011; Rasmussen et al. 2011; Oppenheimer 2012; Henn et al. 2012;
Sankararaman et al. 2012; Pugach et al. 2012; Boivin et al. 2013; Mellars 2013; Fu et al. 2013;
Rohling et al. 2013; Sankararaman et al. 2014; Vernot & Akey 2014;

11. Thinking about
hominid evolution

12. Paleoclimatology over 7 my describes a framework of fluctuating
ecological change driving hominin evolution
12 Potts, R. 2013. Hominin evolution in settings of strong environmental variability. Quaternary Science Reviews 73, 1-13
 Hominin evolution and
environmental
variability over the
past 7 million years.
 Alternative responses
to variability
– Genetic adaptation
(change)
– Cultural change
– Cultural accumulation

13. Genes & memes – genetic vs cultural adaptation
 Genes
– Determine individual anatomical, physiological and neurological
capacities
– Mutation: physical change to one or more DNA nucleotides on a
chromosome
 Change is slow multi-generational process depending on natural selection
 Movement rather than increased versatility
 Meme = unit of culture (an idea or value or pattern of behavior or
knowledge) that may be passed between individuals or from one
generation to another by non-genetic means
– Change often intra-generational depending on innovation, social
relationships and processes
– Transmission limited by genetic capacity to communicate detailed
information
– Essential information easily lost or corrupted over generations.
– Rate and extent of cultural accumulation depend on genetic capacity,
group size, (culturally transmitted) cultural practices13

14. Adaptation = application of genetic or cultural
knowledge to solve problems of life
 Natural selection on genes works at the level of
individual genetic variation depending on successes of
carriers of particular genes in the population
 Selection on cultural knowledge works at the level of
culturally variant groups, depending on successes of
the different groups.
– A group whose shared cultural knowledge allows it to solve
problems other groups can’t solve grows at the expense of those
other groups
– Successful items of cultural knowledge may be carried by
individuals between groups to speed the evolutionary arms race
 Rate of cultural evolution depends on individuals’
genetically determined capacities to understand,
remember, and transmit cultural knowledge14

15. Niche shifts (left) vs niche expansions (right). Vertical axis
represents survival probability of particular phenotypes.
 Niche shift
– Mutation is blind
– Natural selection tracks current requirements, generally with continuing
specialization
 Niche expansion
– Retain original adaptation together with adding new capabilities, i.e.,
accumulation or (very rare) cases of gene duplication and functional divergence
– New mutation crosses adaptive threshold opening new adaptive landscape (i.e.,
grade shift)15

16. Evolutionary hypothesis
―
How tool-using savanna
apes came to dominate
Planet Earth

17. Socially foraging, tool-using forest apes in East
African Rift Valley 5 mya
17
Chimps using probes to collect ants. Probe
is inserted almost to full length into earth.
Child watching mother crack otherwise inedible
palm nuts using stone hammer & anvil.
Adaptive plateaus
achieved in the Pliocene
as our ancestors became
more bipedal and better
adapted to open and arid
environments (White et
al. 2009)
(click pictures below to view videos)

18. Comparative anatomy and biology: rapidly varying ecology during
climatic pulses selects for increasing brain capacity
 Brain capacities correlate with cognitive capacities (many works over many years).
 Major climatic pulse (expansion/contraction E African Rift lakes) causes rapid
ecological variation ~1.8 mya
– Proliferation hominin species
– Initial colonization of Eurasia (Dmanisi)
– Rapid increase in brain capacity in H. erectus (broadly defined)
– Acheulean hand axes begin to appear around 1.7 mya.
18
(Dmanisi)
Shultz, S., Maslin, M. 2013. Early human speciation, brain expansion and dispersal influenced by African climate pulses. PLoS ONE 8(10):
e76750. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076750 - http://tinyurl.com/m38zfke. Pink bars indicate pulses of climate change in E Africa.

19. Impacts of environmental change and variability in E African
Rift (Olduvai, etc.) between 3.0 and 1.5 mya
 Long periods (lasting ∼130–330 ky
each) of magnified moist-arid
variability occurred between
3.0 and 1.5 mya.
 Possible modes of adaptation
– Fail to track (= extinction)
– Track with adaptive change (shift niche)
– Become more versatile (expand niche)
 Limits to genetic adaptation
– Slow & ponderous (intergenerational)
– Do one thing or the other not both
 Cultural adaptation
– Fast (intragenerational)
– Group-based phenomenon – cultural
knowledge pertains to group not particular individuals
– Group knowledge easily lost (dependent on intergenerational knowledge transfer, in turn
dependent on genetically determined capacities, group size, structure, and dynamics)
– Culturally transmitted knowledge relating to tool-making and use was grade-shifting
 Savanna ape inherited limited capacity to transmit cultural knowledge and existing
culture of simple tool-making and use from CLCA
19
Potts, R. 2013. Environmental and behavioral evidence
pertaining to the evolution of early Homo. Current Anthropology
53(S6), S229-S317.

20.  Forest-dwelling chimpanzee-human last common
ancestor (CLCA)
– Primarily frugivorous with some tool-based extractive foraging
– Fission-fusion social structure, some transfer of cultural knowledge
– High selfishness, limited cooperation in defense and hunting
 Savanna ape as extractive foragers
– Edible plant resources more widely scattered and harder to find
– New kinds of resources needed
 Roots, tubers and nuts
 Meats
– New dangers
 Big cats
 Hyenas
 Wild dogs
 Bears
 Selection pressures
– Retain & transfer cultural knowledge
– Increase memory & cognitive capacity
Climatic deterioration in E African Rift Valley expelled forest
apes from the Garden of Eden ~5 mya
20
(Tattersall 2012)

21. Hominins using haak en steek branches as tools (Guthrie 2007): a. for driving big cats away from
their prey. b. for hunting - given the simple conversion of a thorn branch into a "megathorn" lance.
Cooperative defense and scavenging of carnivore kills cached in trees
gave early hominins increased access to meat on the savanna
 Simple requisites for grade shift to aggressive scavenging on the ground
– Coordinated & cooperative defense and offense using effective deterrence
– Oldowan butchering tools for cutting skin & ligaments
21
 Savanna offers limited resource of edible plant foods but
a rich supply of grass-eating herbivore meat
 Chimpanzee social defence against leopards is uncoordi-
nated mobbing with clubs as per video (click to view)
- Might deter leopard from returning to tree cache
- Not a pride of lions or mob of hyenas on ground

22. 22
With thorn branches, spears and stone butchering tools,
hominins became top carnivores on the savanna
 Oldowan tools made & used
from 2.6 to 1.7 mya
– Hominin teeth can’t tear skin
and flesh of large prey
– Anvils & hammer stones used to
access marrow from scavenged
carcasses
– Kanzi the bonobo learned to
break stones & use flakes as cutting tools
– Early hominin culture assimilates knowledge that broken hammer stones
can be used to cut skin & ligaments for butchering large prey before
lost to competing carnivores and scavengers
 More sophisticated Acheulean hand choppers & other tools made
& used from 1.7 mya to 0.1 mya facilitated butchering but
required greater knowledge & dexterity to make
 Note exceedingly slow rate of technological change
– Suggests neural/social/linguistic capacity to accumulate knowledge
of complex technologies was stringently limited for most of hominin
history

23.  3 mya cooperative and
aggressive scavenging of
kills reduced food supply
for some species of
carnivores causing local
extinctions.
 1.8 mya tool-using hominins
in Olduvai Gorge were top
carnivores selectively
hunting prime quality bovid
prey.
 By 1.77 mya carnivorous
hominins extended to Dmanisi,
Georgia, and soon spread across Asia and into Europe (as H.
erectus)
By 3 to 2 mya hominin competition and dominance of other carnivores
begins to reduce overall carnivore diversity in E. Africa
23
Werdelin & Lewis 2013.

24.  Genetic enhancements to meet increasing cognitive needs
– Capacity for geographical (mental map) and natural history knowledge
– Understand time & process to plan & coordinate hunting
– Better neuromuscular control and knowledge of resources & planning
for tool making & use
– Increased capacity for teaching & learning
 Facilitate master-apprentice and other social relationships
 Share and direct attention to critical aspects of process & technique
 Use gesture, mime and acting-out (dance)
 Cultural accumulation of knowledge begins to replace genetic
change as most important adaptive mechanism
– Knowledge accumulation still limited
 Capacity to remember
 Slow genetic evolution of more memory capacity
– Technological innovations may be lost & reinvented several times & may
take hundreds of thousands of years to be consolidated
2 – 1.5 mya selective environment for hominin carnivores
affecting genetic & cultural changes
24

25. Theoretical interlude:
―
Unification of Karl Popper’s
evolutionary theory of knowledge
and
Maturana and Varela’s
autopoiesis
Hall, W.P. 2011. Physical basis for the emergence
of autopoiesis, cognition and knowledge. Kororoit
Institute Working Papers No. 2: 1-63.

26. Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge
Natural selection builds knowledge (= solutions to problems)
26
Pn a real-world problem faced by a
living entity
TS a tentative solution/theory.
Tentative solutions are varied
through serial/parallel iteration
EE a test or process of error
elimination
Pn+1 changed problem as faced by an
entity incorporating a surviving
solution
The whole process is iterated
 All knowledge claims are constructed, cannot be proven to be true
 TSs may be embodied as “structure” in the “knowing” entity, or
 TSs may be expressed in words as hypotheses, subject to objective criticism; or as
genetic codes in DNA, subject to natural selection
 Objective expression and criticism lets our theories die in our stead
 Through cyclic iteration, sources of errors are found and eliminated
 Solutions/theories become more reliable as they survive repetitive testing
 Surviving TSs are the source of all knowledge!
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge – An Evolutionary Approach
(1972), pp. 241-244

27. Knowledge-based autopoietic groups as higher-order
evolutionary entities
 Accumulated knowledge determines system’s structural adaptations to
ensure survival and (re)production
 An entity is defined to be autopoietic if it exhibits all the criteria
– Bounded (groups geographically and socially separated with culturally regulated
and limited mixing)
– Complex (groups formed of several to many individuals playing various different
roles in group)
– Mechanistic (energetically/economically driven interactions of group individuals
determine group functions)
– Self-referential (group identity and boundaries determined by culturally
transmitted knowledge)
– Self-producing (group retains its continuity beyond the lifetimes of single
individuals through individual reproduction and recruitment combined with
indoctrination in and transmission of accumulated cultural knowledge from one
generation to the next)
– Autonomous (the group manages its own survival and continuity through
knowledge-based interactions of its individual members)
 Hierarchically nested systems possible
– Cells  Organisms  Social organizations  Communities
27

28. Popper’s “three worlds” ontology
Energy flow
Thermodynamics
Physics
Chemistry
Biochemistry
Cybernetic
self-regulation
Cognition
Consciousness
Tacit knowledge
Genetic heredity
Recorded thought
Computer memory
Logical artifacts
Explicit knowledge
Reproduce/Produce
Develop/Recall
World 1
External Reality
World 2
Organismic/personal/
situational/subjective/tacit
knowledge in world 2 emerges
from world 1
World 3
The world of “objective”
knowledge produced in
world 2
“living
knowledge”
“codified
knowledge”
The real
world
28

29. 29
Popper’s knowledge in an autopoietic entity
29
Material Reality
WORLD 1
AUTOPOIETIC
SYSTEM
Embodied
cybernetic
knowledge
WORLD 2 Recall
ITERATION/SELECTION
THROUGH TIME
Produce
Symbolically
encoded
knowledge/
memory
WORLD 3
The physical system
and its dynamics
The impact of history
(and introspective
feedback) on current
structure and dynamics
Codified heritage
Epistemic
cuts

30. Knowledge-based autopoietic groups as higher-order
evolutionary entities
30

31. Emergence of the
knowledge-based socio-
technical organization
Socio-technical ecological entity
= group + tools

32. Language and the emergence of hominin groups as
higher order autopoietic systems
 Drivers for the evolution of a faculty of language
– Coordination of individuals’ involvement in group activities and
society
– Facilitates transfer of the body of essential cultural (i.e.
survival) knowledge/heritage
 Survival knowledge shared and propagated via language
among the group and across generations determines
success on the adaptive landscape – group selection
 Language - Phenomenon of groups not individuals
 Probably evolved > 500kya in common ancestor to Homo
sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans
 Common language, cultural norms & xenophobia
determine and help to maintain boundaries of
knowledge-based groups
32

33. 33
Cognitive skills needed to accumulate knowledge for niche expansion
(Vaesen 2012; Sterelny 2011, 2012a, b)
 Hand-eye coordination - fine motor control needs more neurons
 Causal reasoning - time-binding; understand goals, actions, and
consequences
 Function representation - associate particular tools with
particular jobs
 Natural history intelligence - conscious attention to
understanding the behaviors of predators, prey, fire, other
changing aspects of environment
 Executive control – anticipating, deciding & planning; not just
reacting
 Social intelligence - extended childhood, social learning (imitation
not emulation), understanding of intentions of others (mirror
neurons?), focused teaching & learning, apprenticeship
 Intragroup coordination
 Intergroup collaboration
 Language

34. Red oval = Broca’s Area
Stout, D., Chaminade, T. 2012. Stone tools,
language and the brain in human evolution.
Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B 367,
75-87 - http://tinyurl.com/kpotjro.
 Triadic niche construction: neural/cognitive/ecological (Iriki & Taoka 2012)
 Brocas’ Area
– Expanded area of brain involved in speech and fine
motor control
– Identifiable in hominin endocasts – H. habilis
like modern humans compared to apes.
– Mirror System Hypothesis (MSH) proposes
primitive action-matching system evolved
to support imitation, pantomime, manual
‘protosign’ and ultimately vocal language
 FOXP2 and other speech related genetic
changes affected Broca’s area in our common
ancestors with Neanderthals and Denisovans
 Food processing technologies make food more
digestible enabling natural selection to divert metabolic resources from
the digestive system to development of larger brains
 Larger brains support increased cognitive capacity: memory, mental maps,
greater social complexity, better neuromuscular coordination
Genetic & physiological enhancements facilitating the emergence
of language
34

35. Language and the emergence of hominin groups as
higher order autopoietic systems
 Language - phenomenon of groups not individuals (one hand clapping = nonsense)
 Drivers for the evolution of a faculty of language
– Coordinates individuals’ involvement in group activities and society
– Transmits essential cultural knowledge (heritage)
 Common language, cultural norms & xenophobia determine group boundaries
 Cultural knowledge propagated among individuals between generations by language
determines group success on the adaptive landscape
 An entity is autopoietic if it exhibits all the criteria (Varela et al. 1974)
– Bounded (groups separated socially by cultural differences and breeding systems)
– Complex (groups formed by multiple individuals playing different roles in group)
– Mechanistic (interactions of group individuals determine group functions & activities)
– Self-referential (group identity determined by culturally transmitted knowledge)
– Self-producing (group retains its continuity beyond the lifetimes of single individuals
through individual reproduction and recruitment combined with indoctrination in and
transmission of accumulated cultural knowledge from one generation to the next)
– Autonomous (group manages its own survival and continuity through knowledge-based
interactions of its individual members)
 Autopoietic entities represent units of selection
 Pre-linguistic groups probably qualified as autopoietic – but group identity and
adaptive variation greatly strengthened by language-assisted cultural accumulation
35

36. 36
Fire users, keepers, & makers
 Opportunistic users > 3 mya ?
– Savanna burns naturally every 2-5 years
– Knowing that just burnt savanna is a good source of high cuisine
 roast meat much more digestible than raw
 Roasting makes inedible/indigestible nuts, roots & tubers edible
 Fire keepers > 1 mya (Rolland 2004; Twomey 2011)
– Keepers much better off (cooking, warmth, deter predators)
– Loss of fire potentially catastrophic to group
– Maintaining fire requires social coordination
 Know how to feed and keep a fire (process knowledge)
 Know how to move fire to a new place before fuel resource used up
(anticipation, planning, techniques)
– Keeping the fire is a driver to increase cognitive capacity
 Fire makers ~ 0.5 – 0.4 mya
– Knowing how to start a fire without a natural source
 Striking a spark (what rocks, what tinder?)
 Using a fire stick to create friction embers

37. 37
Fire makers (~500 kya)
 Schöningen ~ 400 - 380 kya (See next slide)
 Bilzingsleben 370 kya (single occupation period for an
open-air hunting camp – Mania & Mania 2005)
– Acheulian stone tools
– 3 huts with internal hearths
– four separate “activity areas” identified by different tool kits &
other artefacts
 tool making
 stone paved area for spit roasting
 skin and bone processing area
 another well paved area with a single hearth & suggestion of ritual
alter
– Fossil remains of elephants, rhinoceros, horses, bison, red deer,
fallow deer, roe deer, pigs, cave lions, cave bears, grey wolves,
spotted hyenas, red foxes, badgers, and martens

38. Schöningen – Complex toolkit (400 – 380 kya)
38
Thieme, H. 2005. The Lower Palaeolithic art of hunting: the case of
Schöningen 13 II-4, Lower Saxony, Germany. (in) Gamble, C., Porr. M.
(eds), The Hominid Individual in Context: Archaeological investigations
of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artifacts.
Routledge, Oxford, pp. 115-132
• Pre Neanderthal
• Seasonal hunting camp
• Level I (the older)
– flint artifacts,
– more than a thousand bones of ten mammalian taxa,
– 4 worked silver fir branches with diagonal grooves cut
into one end – probably for holding sharp flakes
(oldest known compound tools)
• Level II single season’s hunting camp containing
more than 25,000 well preserved bones, (>90%
horses showing signs of butchery. Four separate
hearths were also identified. All stone artifacts
were flint brought the site ready made. The only
flint debris is from retouching, and bone
retouching tools were also found. Wooden tools
included a double pointed throwing stick and nine
wooden spears or throwing javelins with flame
hardened tips ranging in length between 1.8 and
2.5 m left (ritually?) with prey remains
• Organization & capacity suggests language

39. 39
How much knowledge does it take to make & use tools?
Killing prey with stone-tipped spears
 Understanding cognitive demands of technologies
 Thinking a stone-tipped spear
– sequence of steps to make a spear used to bring down prey (chains
of operation/cognigram)
– making a bow and arrow set is at least 3x more difficult
– each arrow indicates ordered application of specific knowledge
(Lombard 2012; Lombard & Haidle 2012)

40.  Development of increasingly complex
stone tools (Stout 2011) correlates
with larger brain capacity and
language development.
 Even with language, knowledge is
limited by what can be learned,
remembered, and passed on by
single individuals.
 By < 500 kya, pace of change in the
capacity to deal with multiple
complexities is too fast for genetic
adaptation
 < 50 kya increasing rate of change
suggests major innovation to support
accumulation of much larger volumes
of knowledge.
What enabled increasing tool complexity?
40
Acheulian
Oldowan
Introduction & exponential
growth of new technologies

41. Modified from Krubitzer & Stolzenberg (2014)
 “All modern human populations have
language, and there is no difference in
language capacity between living human
populations. Parsimony implies that the
most recent common ancestor of all
modern humans had language, and had
all the biological prerequisites for
language” (Johansson 2013).
 The common distribution of language
proxies across human and neanderthals
in genomic, paleoanthropological, and
paleoarcheological contexts show that
human, Denisovan and Neanderthal
common ancestor had a capacity for
modern language, speech and culture
(Dediu & Levinson 2013, etc.)41
Krubitzer, L., Stolzenberg, D.S. 2014. The evolutionary masquerade: genetic and epigenetic
contributions to the neocortex. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 24, 157-165.
Dediu, D., Levinson, S.C. 2013. On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation
of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences. Frontiers in Language
Science DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397/
Johansson, S. 2013. The talking neanderthals: what do fossils, genetics, and archeology
say? Biolinguistics 7, 35-74.
Schöningen
&
Bilzingsleben
Indicators for the emergence of modern
cognition in Neanderthals & H. sapiens

42. Two extraordinary snapshots imply that linguistic capabilities
already existed 400 kya in LCA Neanderthal / H. sapiens
 Schöningen II (single-use hunting camp 380 kya – Thieme 2005)
– Captured, butchered and processed at least 20 horses
– Tools made elsewhere include 9 wood lances left (ritually?) with herd remains
– 4 hearths, associated tools & evidence for spit-roasting, smoking and drying
– Earliest evidence for compound tools
 Bilzingsleben (base camp 370 kya - Mania & Mainia 2005)
– 3 x 3-4 m dia. huts with hearths all oriented against wind
– Prey included fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, elephants, rhinoceros, horses,
bison, deer, pigs, lions, bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, badgers, and martens
– Spit roasting & smoking for preservation
– Evidence for making & use of wide variety of stone and bone tools
– Paved area with artifacts suggestive of ritual activities.
 Implications
– Long-range planning (harvesting and preserving; anticipating the need)
– Planning and coordinating cooperative hunting of large, dangerous animals
– Wide range of natural history, tool-making and food-processing knowledge
– Ritual activities/thinking
 Diversity and complexity of cultural knowledge for inferred activities
beyond the capacity to communicate without language.
42

43. The Middle Stone Age (Africa) / Middle Paleolithic (Europe) was
a post Acheulian technological plateau (~ 300 → ~ 50 kya)
 Primary references: Current Anthropology, Vol. 54, No. S8, Wenner-Gren
Symposium: Alternative Pathways to Complexity: Evolutionary
Trajectories in the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age (December
2013 – free to the Web)
 Acheulian tools continued to be used by other hominins (e.g., H. erectus)
 Technology variable through MSA / MP but no clear temporal trends
– Sporadic development and loss of complex technologies
– Operational chains of limited length
 Despite major ecological shifts between glacial and inter-glacial there is
no evidence for permanent settlements or cultural shifts from nomadic
hunting and gathering.
– Little technological difference between Neanderthal/Denisovan/archaic H.
sapiens in Europe, anatomically modern sapiens in South Africa, and AM sapiens
in the Levant (eastern Med.) early colonization ~ 100 kya, and permanent
colonization and spread to Eurasia ~ 70 kya
– Populations limited in size to small bands, with evidence that Neanderthals &
Denisovans passed through more severe genetic bottlenecks than sapiens
 Even with language, the capacity for cultural memory was limited43

44. Slowly increasing pace of hominin technological innovation in the
East African homeland
 Even given the existence of a faculty of language, the pace of
technological innovation was very slow before 100 kya.
 Use of fire in making fine
blades and points, or use of
ochre and beads may have
been developed & lost
several times before being
fixed in culture
 Even where ideas can be
expressed in words, an
individual’s ability to
remember detail is limited.
 Where population is divided
into small groups any
knowledge not securely
acquired by the next
generation is lost
44 McBrearty & Brooks 2000

45. Something changed ~ 70-50 kya that enabled H. sapiens to
increase its cultural capacity to store & transmit knowledge
 Mnemonics – increasing capacity for accumulating knowledge in
primary oral culture differs from typographically based culture
– Primary sources for understanding mental techniques used in primary
oral cultures to accurately memorize and recall large and complex
bodies of information:
– Ong, W.J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, London [eBook free
download from http://tinyurl.com/ledoljk]
– Kelly, L. 2012. When Knowledge Was Power. PhD Thesis, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Latrobe University, Bundoora, Vic., Australia [embargoed until Cambridge University Press book is
published – see http://blog.lynnekelly.com.au/memory-and-archaeology/]
– Techniques - think memorably: express knowledge in rhythm and rhyme
with common formulas and phrases, link breathing and gesture, act out,
associate with song and dance, organize by intrinsic logic, etc.
 Master technique: the method of loci (see next slide)
– May increase individual memory capacity by 10 to 100-fold or more
– Use at group level to preserve and transmit cultural knowledge
– Cultural capacity depends on group size – larger groups allow formation
of subgroups (i.e., “guilds”) to manage specialized bodies of knowledge
45

46. Method of Loci builds on the natural rhythms and progression of
life
 Memorable events happen in time and space (specific locus in 3D space)
– Innate way to organize memory probably common to all “intelligent” animals
– Focus on the space-time locus to retrieve memories of circumstances and events
that happened at that locus
 Songlines:
– hunter gatherers learned to consciously index geographic, resource & natural
history knowledge against tracks in the existing landscape where it is relevant.
– Other knowledge may be indexed against loci on other shared lines (e.g., stars in
the night sky) or with stories associated with landscape features, etc
 Method of loci uses an ordered sequence of memorable loci as indexing
points along existing or imagined space-time lines
– Associates memorably expressed snippets of knowledge with particular loci in
the line
– Other mnemonic techniques make snippets memorable (e.g., imagery, rhythm,
rhyme, oration, song, dance)
– Group rehearsal and repetition strengthens memory traces
– Group sharing adds redundancy and corrects errors in individual memory
– In larger populations subgroups can maintain specialized knowledge
46

47. Becoming settled – surmounting the knowledge
capacity of nomadic life in the post-glacial era
 Nomads limited to technology they can carry or fabricate on demand
 Accumulating technological knowledge enables more effective use of
smaller geographic areas – growing populations manage more knowledge
 Can establish core living areas with permanent goods & structures
 Reduced contact with tracks in the broad landscape combined with need
to manage more and more specialized knowledge of technology drives
development of new mnemonic systems
 Solution: When songlines no longer suffice, build compact monumental
landscapes that can be traversed sequentially (Kelly 2012 - e.g.,
Stonehenge, Poverty Point, Chaco Canyon Kivas, etc.)
– Early site: Göbekli Tepe ~ 11 kya
southern Turkey 3 ky before the
agricultural revolution
– Many other sites from primary oral
cultures moving from nomadic hunting
and gathering to settled life have
similar monumental structures
47

48. Mnemonics, settlement, the agricultural revolution and increasing
cultural complexity
 Current Anthropology 52(S4), Wenner-Gren Symposium: “The Origins of
Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas” (October 2011) reviews in detail the
archeological record of cultural & demographic transitions from nomadic
hunting & gathering to formation of agricultural towns
 With settlement, nomadic groups become territorial villages
– The autopoietic entity becomes a socio-technical construct comprised of
people, their linguistically mediated communication networks, their knowledge,
their technologies and their built environment
 Positive feedback drives ever-increasing growth rate of cultural
knowledge accumulation for ever-increasing ecological hegemony over
environmental resources
– Accumulating cultural knowledge enables more efficient/effective control of
local resources
– Surplus resources enables population growth in turn providing more capacity
for cultural memory
– Development of ever more sophisticated mnemonic devices
– Population growth enables more specialization of crafts, trades and guilds able
to accumulate still more varied and detailed knowledge of the world
48

49. Ecological grade shifts result in demographic transitions &
increasing socio-cultural/economic complexity
 Mobile hunter-gatherers (~15 – 20 adults in group – say 2-4 families)
– Part-time tool-makers & apprentices (realm of specific tool-making resources and processes
knowledge)
– Organized hunting parties
– Gatherers (also need specialized geographic & natural history knowledge)
– Temporary shelter construction, child-minding, fire tending, food processing & preparation
– Extended social and knowledge networks around annual/seasonal meeting places to access
additional mating opportunities, exchange of knowledge & barter limited trade goods
 Settled foragers (~ 40 adults in community – say 8 families) require more knowledge
– Knowledge & skill to make specialized tools kept for occasional use  full-time tool-making
– Widely ranging hunting parties still need to transport butchered products back to home-base
– Gathering and harvesting known seasonal resources becomes locally more intensive
– Building permanent shelters (i.e., houses) & other more specialized structures
– Need to guard and protect increasingly valuable “capital” (community / personal ”property”)
– Establishment of formal trading networks & mnemonic systems for formally preserving, sharing
and exchanging knowledge at a “tribal” level
 Production of specialized goods and surplus resources  development of formal barter economy
  Social norms and knowledge specialties common to the “tribe” of interrelated communities
  Sspecialized “cultic” sites on neutral territory away from existing community settlements enabling the
controlled rehearsal, standardization, and sharing of various bodies of knowledge
49

50. Agricultural Revolution extends human control over
animal and plant metabolism
 Major techno-ecological transitions
– Hunting  herding & corralling  husbandry, dairying, cheese-making, tanning,
animal power & transport
– Harvesting, storage, milling, baking & brewing  planting  tilling & irrigating
– Stone & mud construction  brick making & firing  pottery & metallurgy
 Demographic revolution – egalitarian communities become hierarchically
organized towns (dozens to hundreds of families), tribal regions, & guilds
 Revolutionary emergence of new mnemonic and knowledge management
technologies replace demands for memorization for thinking and doing
– Indexing living memory vs representing knowledge with objective symbols
– Reducing the monumental landscape onto tracks fabricated into hand-held objects
– Representing reality with symbolic tokens:
  Increasing socio-economic complexity, economic speciation, and
emergence of knowledge-based autopoietic entities at intermediate levels
– Religious orders, trades, guilds, factories, chartered companies, societies
50

51. Printing and the Industrial Revolution, replacing human/animal
motive power, and externalizing storage of knowledge
 (560 ya) Rise of printing for recording, replicating and
transmitting knowledge
– Technologies: papermaking, type founding & setting, printing, post-
press, distributing, indexing, book making, curating, etc.
– Scholarly access to large volumes of recorded, knowledge encouraging
testing, accumulating & disseminating more knowledge
 Increased literacy and access to tech knowledge fuels innovation
 (~ 300 ya) technology replaces animal and human motive power
with inorganic sources
– Mass production of many things, including books
– General literacy, social upheaval, dislocation and rising affluence
– Ecological hegemony over land and sea
– Exponential knowledge growth
  Emergence of knowledge-based economic
organizations as autopoietic entities
– personal knowledge vs organizational knowledge51

52. The Microelectronics Revolution and the increasing
externalization and convergence of individual and social cognition
 ~ 150 ya mechanical and electro/mechanical technologies for corporate/scientific
number crunching & data processing
 ~ 50 ya birth of electronic digital processing
– invention of transistorized logic circuits
– ~ 43 ya invention of integrated circuit microprocessors and automatic fabrication (Intel
4004 1971)
 Moore’s Law & the still continuing hyperexponential growth of processing power
 Extending and replacing more and more human cognition
 ~ 35 ya automated processing, storage, distribution and retrieval of personal and
corporate knowledge. (Wordstar 1979)
 ~ 22 ya networking knowledge with the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee 1992)
 Universal access to the world knowledge base
– ~ 20 ya Mosaic Netscape Navigator 1994
– ~ 16 ya free open-source browsers Mozilla Firefox 1998
– Indexing knowledge for retrieval
 ~ 14 ya one billion web pages indexed, more than two billion by end of 2000
 Last decade provides instant web search, access & retrieval of virtually the entire scientific & technical literature via
Google Scholar/research library subscriptions
 Majority of all English language book titles scanned, indexed, and available (if out of copyright), with smaller fractions
non-English books processed.
 Networking brains directly – towards a singularity or global mind?
52

53. Convergence of
Technology and Cognition
to Produce the humano-
technical individual
biological entity = person + tools

54. Interconnecting minds and cognitive processes via the cloud
“social computing” and convergent technology
 Technological convergence – mobile phone becomes
a cognitive prosthesis
– Email: ARPANET (1971), TCP/IP (1982), SMS text (2002),Gmail (2005)
– Internet browsing & Search: MOSAIC/Netscape (1994),Google (!997)
– Internet telephony: Voice over IP (1994), Skype (2003)
– Media: iTunes (2000), Amazon Kindle (2007), Google Play (2008)
– Still and video imaging: Picassa/iPhoto (2002); YouTube (2005);
– Cloud storage: Napster (1999), BitTorrent (2001), Amazon S3 (2006),
DropBox (2008)
– Business/Office tools: Google Docs/Drive (2007)
– Geospatial: Google Earth/Maps 2005; Panoramio (geolocated photos converging
with Google Earth/Google Maps – 2005)
– Social: chat rooms (1980); Groups/Listservers (1992), LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006)
– Knowledge construction/sharing/broadcasting: Wikis (1994), Wikipedia (2002), Blogs/Wordpress (2003)
 Human-computer interfacing
– Head-mounted displays (1960’s)
– Google Project Glass (2013)
 Implanted/embodied human-machine interfaces
– Cochlear implants/Bionic Ears
– Retinal implants/Bionic Eyes
– Direct brain stimulation
54

55. Sensory integration:
Count on Moore’s Law to drive the price down
55
Direct
stimulation of
the cochlea
(Graeme Clark
Foundation, How
the cochlear
implant (bionic
ear) functions.)
Direct
stimulation of
the retina (Bionic
Eye. DOE
Artificial Retina
Project)

56. Brain simulation and emulation
Blue Brain Project / Human Brain Project
 Human Connectome Project
– US NIH funded 2010-2015
– Map of neural connections in the
brain
– Broadly, a connectome includes
mapping of all neural connections
in an organism's nervous system
 Simulation & emulation
– Modelling of synapses & neurons
– Neurons on chips (Moore’s Law)
– EU Blue Brain/Human Brain Projects
 Single cell: 2005
 Neocortical column: 2008 – 10,000 cells
 Mesocircuit: 2011 – 100 columns
 Rodent brain: ~2014 – 100 mesocircuits
 Human brain: ~2023 – 1000 x rodent brains
56

57. The Challenge to be met by Moore’s Law
(Blue Brain Project)
57

58. Emergence of the socio-
technical organization
Organizational entity = individual
members + technology +
organizational knowledge

59. A reminder
 Socio-technical
organizational system =
individual members +
technology +
organizational knowledge
– Organizational knowledge
 What individual members
know about the org.
 Explicit knowledge held,
managed in and accessed via
technology owned by the
organization
 Knowledge embodied in
organizational structure and
operating routines
 Individuals may belong to more than one organization at a time
 More knowledge supports more complexity and adaptive capacity
 Selective processes also work at organizational level
– Competition and survival
– Lateral and temporal transfer of cultural knowledge59

60. Emergence of a complex organizational entity
(Nousala & Hall 2008)
60

61. Many aspects of organizational structure defined explicitly
independently from memory of any individual
61

62. organisational
revolution
evolutionary
growth
L. Greiner 1998. Evolution and revolution as organizations grow.
Harvard Business Review May-June 1998
62
Revolutions involve
changes in cognitive
structure of organization
often supported by
technological change
and innovation,
e.g., new information
& knowledge mgmt
systems

63. CODA
What kind of singularity do we face?