Résumé

For better or worse, humans are now one of the major causal forces acting on the earth’s biosphere. Many would point to technology as the reason, but what exactly is technology? In this lecture, I will develop an evolutionarily grounded definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. Using examples from my own lab’s studies of stone tool making, I will argue that these features implicate a wide range of perceptual, motor, and cognitive capacities as well as multiple channels of cultural inheritance and biocultural evolutionary processes. This perspective blurs presumed distinctions between social and individual learning that have shaped formal modeling approaches to cultural evolution. In so doing it calls into question the idea that one key capacity, event, or evolutionary Rubicon initiated cumulative technological evolution and established a pattern of sustained autocatalytic biocultural feedback in human evolution. This interpretation is consistent with growing paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence of the multi-lineal, intermittent, asynchronous course of human evolution, and presents a view of technological evolution as a complex and contingent process spanning a scale from neurons to societies and beyond. Nevertheless, some synthesis may be possible with respect to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. In this vein, I advance a “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world. Testing such hypotheses will require a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to identify patterned relations between contexts, mechanisms, and functions across diverse technological systems.

Référence

Dietrich Stout (Emory University), « The Biocultural Evolution of Technology », IAST General Seminar, Toulouse : IAST, 27 juin 2023, 11h30–12h30, salle Auditorium 4 (First floor - TSE Building).