Quaternary International xxx (2015) 1e7

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Quaternary International
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The cultural dimension of cognition

Trevor Watkins
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Available online xxx

Around the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene in southwest Asia, human skills in cultural
niche construction were qualitatively upgraded in order to support the formation of large, permanently
co-resident communities and regional interaction networks with new and sophisticated forms of symbolic action and representation. The transition from small, mobile forager bands to networks of large
permanent communities that occurred between 22,000 and 8500 years ago was enabled by the significant development of what Merlin Donald has called theoretic culture, communicated and stored in
systems of external symbolic storage. The over-arching role of symbolic culture became the highly
developed core of what we may call the cognitive-cultural niche, within which and by means of which
children learned and adults understood and expressed their identity and their place in the world. The
extraordinary plasticity of the modern human brain and its developmental responsiveness to context
meant that individuals formed their identity through a long process of enculturation within a cognitively
powerful cultural niche. While we are accustomed to literacy and dependence on written sources, they
were more adept with other media, particularly ceremonies and rituals, and the making of memory in
monuments, artistic representations, signs and systems of symbols.
2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Cultural niche construction theory
Neolithic
Epi-palaeolithic
Southwest Asia

1. Introduction
In this paper I argue that the material dimension of cognition is
essentially a cultural dimension, which we can see changing its
nature in a signicant way around the PleistoceneeHolocene
transition in southwest Asia. We cannot think of the material
dimension of cognition in any absolute sense, without concern for
its cultural context in time and space. The material dimension of
cognition among Homo erectus, for example, was qualitatively
different from that among archaic Homo sapiens, which in turn was
different from that among recent H. sapiens; and, because of the
diversity of cultural variation, it will present differently in different
contemporary cultural contexts. As a prehistoric archaeologist
interested in the transformation that brought about the rst large,
permanently co-resident communities and established farming
economies in southwest Asia, I am exploring the way that those
communities developed new systems of symbolic representation in
material form. I want to understand the role of what appears to be
the signicantly enhanced symbolic material dimension within
those new communities. For more than one hundred thousand
years, modern humans have learned to make and share meaning

E-mail address: master.watkins@gmail.com.

out of material in ways that are without precedent in human evolution; from that early start, the cultural facility with material signs
and symbols grew (and continues to grow) at an exponential rate.
The transformation that we can observe around the PleistoceneeHolocene transition in southwest Asia, however, represents a
remarkable expansion of these cognitive-cultural abilities. Moreover, it was accompanied by the emergence of a way of life in
networks of large, sedentary communities that was fundamental
for all of later prehistory and the historical periods that have followed. I seek to argue that these two processes e the emergence of
large-scale, permanently co-resident communities, and the development of monumental architecture and complex sculptural representations - are reciprocally interrelated, and can be understood
in the context of an extension of cultural niche construction theory.
The conventional wisdom among archaeologists for a long time
has been that the key element in the process of neolithisation, or
the Neolithic revolution in southwest Asia was the domestication
of plants and animals and the development of farming economies;
accounts of the process typically reach back beyond the beginning
of the Neolithic period into the last two or three millennia of the
preceding Epi-palaeolithic period. I see the process as taking place
over a much longer time-scale, beginning at least as early as the
inception of the Levantine Upper Palaeolithic almost 50,000 years
ago; in that long-term perspective, the terms neolithisation and

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Neolithic revolution become misnomers. I believe that we can

better understand the nature of the process if we see it in evolutionary terms within the context of a profound re-shaping of the
cultural niche.
First, I will sketch an outline of the multi-factorial components
of the process. Then, I will introduce niche construction theory,
more particularly cultural niche construction theory. Niche construction theory provides a conceptual framework for modelling
the evolutionary process (Odling-Smee et al., 2003), is applicable to
many (most?) species, and is particularly useful for understanding
the way of life of social animals. Cultural niche construction theory
recognizes the important role that human culture plays in the
human situation (Kendal, 2011; Kendal et al., 2011; Laland and
O'Brien, 2011). The arguments in this paper are underpinned by
the evolutionary dynamic of the social brain hypothesis (Dunbar,
1998, Dunbar et al., 2014; Gamble et al., 2014); this proposes that
the expensive, long-term increase in size of the human brain,
particularly the pre-frontal cortex, was necessary to support the
exponential growth in the cognitive load of living in larger and
more cohesive social groups. In that story of increasing social group
size, culture has played an important role, and not just in terms of
technology and material culture. In the latter part of this paper, I
will discuss how the PleistoceneeHolocene transformation illustrates a major change in the functioning of the H. sapiens cultural
niche, which I call the cognitive-cultural niche. My thesis is that the
increasing population density and co-resident group size through
the Epi-palaeolithic and Neolithic of southwest Asia is an acceleration of a long-term trend that is not accompanied by, and is indeed
too rapid for, the biological evolution of the human brain. As H.
sapiens social group size in southwest Asia (and no doubt in other
regions of the world) was at the physical limit of the social brain
(Dunbar, 1998), human cultural ingenuity provided a means of
growing community size beyond that physical limitation. I will
argue that the material symbolising capacities of the cognitivecultural niche were evolved to sustain the coherence of human
communities of several hundred, and later several thousand
permanently co-resident individuals. This transformation of the
human cultural niche opened the way for the relatively rapid
development of the very large-scale human communities in which
we have grown up and with which we are instinctively familiar.
2. Three strands in a long-term process of transformation
There are three aspects to this transformation: as they are
intertwined, we can think of them as strands. Most research has
been concentrated on the domestication of plants and animals and
the development of farming economies, which we may take as the
rst of those three strands, but only because of the primacy that the
origins of agriculture has been given by researchers. The development of effective farming economies came at the end of a
sequence of important changes in subsistence and settlement
strategy, for which the best evidence has been built up over many
years from sites in the southern Levant. We know that people were
harvesting, storing and processing wild grasses, cereals and pulses
for many thousands of years before pre-domestication cultivation
began around the Epi-palaeolithiceNeolithic transition (Kislev
et al., 1992; Weiss et al., 2004). We have the heavy ground-stone
implements for pounding and grinding from at least the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic period (Wright, 1994); and, from the
Upper PalaeolithiceEpipalaeolithic transition at least 22,000 years
ago, we have direct evidence of the carbonised seeds of grasses,
cereals and legumes, and identiable starch residues on the surfaces of grinding slabs (Piperno et al., 2004). While the focus has
been on dening the moment of domestication, it still took a
thousand years or more before people established crop

management on which they could rely. With animal domestication,

there was a series of changes in hunting, trapping and shing
strategies before herding began and domesticated species appeared
(Stiner et al., 2000; Zeder, 2012). Reliance on their animal herds
came a thousand or more years after domestication (Conolly et al.,
2011).
The second strand is demographic. Based on the evidence of the
reducing availability of prime hunting prey, the increasing pressure
on hunted gazelle, and increasing time and effort invested in
obtaining small, fast-moving animals and birds, growth in population density in the Levant began from at least the Last Glacial
Maximum and continued through the Epipalaeolithic period
(Davis, 1991; Stiner et al., 2000; Munro, 2004; Davis, 2005). Israeli
colleagues have estimated the number of settlement sites per
thousand years through the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic for
different parts of southwest Asia (Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen,
2011: Fig. 2). Their best quantitative data comes from the southern
Levant. In the north Levant, we lack data on the Epipalaeolithic, but
the rise through the Neolithic is a similar gradient to that in the
south. In the early Neolithic in the southern Levant (9600e7000
BC) the average size of settlements increased by a factor of 10, and
the density of buildings also grew dramatically by a factor of at least
four times (Kuijt, 2000). Putting together those trends in size,
density of occupation, and numbers of settlements, it is clear that
there was a massive rise in overall population, as well as an
equivalent rise in the size of co-resident communities (that is, the
population units that are represented in the archaeological record
by the settlements that they built and in which they lived). By the
latter part of the early Neolithic period, there were settlements
with populations estimated at 5000 to 10,000 (for instance, atayk in central Turkey, see Cessford, 2005). Where there were
lho
typically Palaeolithic, small-scale, repeated occupations of cavemouths, rock-shelters, and open locations, in the Epipalaeolithic
period cave and rock-shelter occupations sometimes expanded to
cover extensive open areas, and open sites grew in size and began
to accumulate indications of long-term occupation. From quite
early in the Epipalaeolithic period, there were settlements that had
accumulated clear stratigraphies of repeated re-buildings (e.g. Neve
David in northern Israel: Kaufman, 1989; Uyun al-Hammam in
Jordan: Maher, 2007; Kharaneh IV, also in Jordan: Maher, 2010;
Maher et al., 2012; Richter et al., 2013); but in the early Neolithic,
settlements grew to become the typical mounded landscape form
yk in
that Arabic speakers recognised as a tell (or tepe or ho
other languages).
The third strand is the rise in the quantity, scale and complexity
of symbolic representation in material form. Skipping over the
symbolic aspects of domestic architecture (though not failing to
mention my own contribution: Watkins, 1990), I must point to a
series of large, circular, subterranean communal buildings at the
centre of early Neolithic settlements from southeast Turkey,
through north Syria and Cyprus, as far as southern Jordan. These
earliest Neolithic examples are pregured by similar, large, circular,
(semi-)subterranean buildings that do not appear to be domestic in
purpose from late Epi-palaeolithic sites such as Eynan in the north
of Israel (Valla, 1988), and Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan (HardySmith and Edwards, 2004; Edwards, 2009), and another such
building at Tell Mureybet in north Syria, which dates to the very
end of the Epi-palaeolithic; this last structure is very similar in
internal structural detail to two of those at early Neolithic Jerf el
Ahmar (Stordeur et al., 2000). The rst to become widely known
was found at Jerf el Ahmar, in the Euphrates valley in north Syria
(Stordeur et al., 2000). It is the scale of the communal effort and
organization that was required to create the cavity (7 m in diameter
and about 3 m deep) in which it was constructed that is so
impressive. These structures are clearly different from the general

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T. Watkins / Quaternary International xxx (2015) 1e7

run of much smaller, simpler buildings that make up the settlement. We cannot make a simple one-to-one relationship between a
communal building and a settlement, making a simple equation
between a community and a communal structure, because we do
not have complete exposures of whole settlements. Nevertheless, it
is reasonable to think that these large, subterranean structures
required a large-scale, organized labour-force.
Each of these communal buildings is unique in its structural
details. The cells in the rst Jerf el Ahmar example were used for the
mass storage of cereal grains and lentils. Several of these subterranean, circular, communal buildings seem to share another noteworthy characteristic: they were ceremonially closed and buried at
the end of their lives. In the Jerf el Ahmar example, the headless
corpse of a young woman was laid spreadeagled on the oor, and a
human head e not hers e was placed in one of the empty postholes.
The roof supports were removed, the roof was collapsed and set on
re, and nally the cavity was completely back-lled.
The most extraordinarily massive and visually powerful sym bekli Tepe, a huge mound,
bolism is being revealed at the site of Go
more than 300 m in diameter and 15e17 m tall, set on a bare
limestone ridge near Urfa in southeast Turkey (Schmidt, 2011,
2012). In a large excavation area on the south side of the mound,
the late Klaus Schmidt uncovered a group of massive, circular,
subterranean enclosures, each 20e30 m in diameter. Each enclosure has a pair of central monoliths, and about a dozen more set
around the perimeter. All the monoliths are carefully shaped to be
rectangular in cross-section; in shape they resemble a capital letter
T. The tallest standing monoliths are the central pair in Enclosure D
at 5.5 m tall. All of the monoliths are sculpted with animals, birds,
reptiles, spiders or scorpions in raised relief. Some monoliths have
hands and arms in low relief, showing that the T-form is a highly
schematic anthropomorph. The central pair in Enclosure D also
wear belts with an elaborate buckle and a fox skin loin-cloth
suspended from it. Like the circular, subterranean, communal
structures in the contemporary settlements, the enclosures at
bekli Tepe were closed - probably quite soon after construction
Go
was nished e and buried in hundreds of tons of stone, soil, and
cultural debris as back-ll.
In summary, then, there was a cultural, social and economic
transformation over 15,000 years; from the mobile forager band
societies of the Upper Palaeolithic there emerged a densely populated landscape of large, permanent communities. Over this period
we can also note that communities engaged in increasingly intense
local, regional and supra-regional networking, involving the exchange of goods and materials of symbolic value, and the sharing of
signs, symbols and cultural types (Watkins, 2008). We have known
of the long-distance transfer of central and eastern Anatolian
obsidian in the Neolithic period since the pioneering work of
Renfrew and his collaborators (Renfrew et al., 1966; Renfrew and
Dixon, 1968, 1976). Recently, a new and related phenomenon has
begun to be recognised in the form of small, at, stone plaques that
would t in the palm of a hand, and that bear incised signs. Early
examples came from Jerf el Ahmar (Stordeur, 2003), but others,
bearing similar or the same signs, have been found at a number of
other early Neolithic sites in north Syria and southeast Turkey,
bekli Tepe. An outlier of this north Levantine distriincluding Go
bution was found at Netiv Hagdud, near Jericho (Bar-Yosef et al.,
1991: Fig. 12), and it seems possible that the our knowledge of
the distribution network stone plaques may be biased towards the
north Levant simply because of the number of recently discovered
sites in salvage excavation programmes in north Syria and southeast Turkey. The signs on the plaques may be components in a
system of what may be termed a non-textual writing system, that
is, a system of signs that have meaning but do not relate directly to
specic words (Morenz, 2009, 2012).

3. Cultural niche construction theory as a framework for

understanding the transformation
The transformation from Palaeolithic (Pleistocene) mobile
foraging bands to Neolithic (Holocene) large, permanently coresident communities was complex and multi-factorial; attempts
to explain it in reductive terms as cultural adaptive responses to
nal Pleistocene climate change and the reduction in food resources in a changing natural environment have proved unsatisfactory, as Melinda Zeder, for example, has discussed at length
(Zeder, 2009, 2012). I have argued that the critical transformation
from life in small-scale groups of uid membership (a ssionfusion way of life that has roots deep in human evolution) to life
in large-scale and permanent communities required cultural adjustments of an equally critical kind (Watkins, 2004a, 2004b, 2006,
2010, 2014). In company with a number of other archaeologists,
biologists and evolutionary scientists, I believe that (cultural) niche
construction theory allows us to articulate the nature of this
transformation. Niche construction theory says that many organisms modify their ecological niches (Laland et al., 2000, 2001;
Odling-Smee et al., 2003). By adapting the environment within
which they live and reproduce, they create an environmental niche
to which they and their offspring in turn adapt. This was elegantly
summarised by Levins and Lewontin (1985: 106): The organism
inuences its own evolution, by being both the object of natural
selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection. Evolution thus becomes a continual feedback loop, rather than a oneway process of the environment acting to exert pressures that
require adaptive responses from the organisms. Humans
throughout the history of the genus Homo, along with their primate
predecessors and their closest primate relatives, have evolved
within different forms of social niche. Humans have used their
unique capacity for culture and social learning in what has been
labelled cultural niche construction (Kendal et al., 2011; Laland and
O'Brien, 2011). Thus, culture comes to play a signicant role in the
formation and maintenance of the selective environment. The
unique plasticity of the human brain means that it is formed within
the developmental environment of the cultural niche (Kendal,
2011). Thus, we modern humans are adapted to spending a long
infancy, childhood and adolescence acquiring cultural and social
competences, skills, ideas, knowledge, and attitudes.
For other species it is enough to say that their engineering of
their ecological niche produces an ecological inheritance. Biologists
working with cultural niche construction theory have been interested in the gene-culture co-evolution (Laland and O'Brien, 2010;
Laland and O'Brien, 2011; Odling-Smee and Laland, 2011); some
have picked on plant and animal domestication as a strong example
(e.g. Smith, 2007; Rowley-Conwy and Layton, 2011; Smith, 2011;
O'Brien and Laland, 2012), or the emergence of lactase tolerance
within populations dependent on the milk products of domesticated animals (e.g. Itan et al., 2009; Gerbault et al., 2011). There is
already a diverse literature of applications of cultural niche construction to aspects of human culture and cultural practice (to cite
only an arbitrary selection: Bickerton, 2009: Clark, 2005; Collard
et al., 2011; Kendal, 2011; Kendal et al., 2011; Rendell et al.,
2011); three international journals have published special issues
on cultural niche construction theory (Biological Theory 6(3), 2011;
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17(4), 2010; Phil
Trans R Soci B 366(1566), 2011). Kim Sterelny in particular has
worked with niche construction theory on human evolution to
good effect (Sterelny, 2001, 2005, 2011). He describes how cultural
niche construction has produced the ability to store, transmit and
accumulate huge amounts of complex cultural knowledge by
means of what he calls apprentice learning. Crucially, he recognises
that cultural niche construction came to involve epistemic, as well

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as ecological engineering, and thus an epistemic inheritance. One

aspect of cultural niche construction, in this view, is the provision of
a learning environment that supports the transmission of cultural
knowledge, beliefs and behaviours, as recognized, for example, by
Laland and O'Brien (2011), and Kendal (2011).
Thus, in the view of Sterelny, and others, for example, Dunbar,
Gamble and Gowlett, the leaders of the Lucy to Language research
project (Dunbar et al., 2010, 2014), modern humans around 40,000
years ago possessed highly sophisticated modes of cultural storage
and transmission that we can comfortably accept as similar to our
own contemporary experience, and which a number of scientists
therefore label as modern. Renfrew challenged this kind of
perspective when he described the sapient behaviour paradox in
the context of a conference concerned with Modelling the early
human mind (Renfrew, 1996); if H. sapiens was fully modern by
the time of the European Upper Palaeolithic, he asked, why do the
cultural remains from that period seem so strange and difcult for
us to comprehend, and why are there so many things that we
associate with more recent times (from the Neolithic onwards, in
Renfrew's case) that are absent from the Palaeolithic record?
Renfrew (2008) has taken the view that the earliest Holocene
communities, who were part of what he calls the sedentary revolution, began to be able to devise abstract concepts of value and
the sacred, but he does not go much further in explaining how
such cognitive and cultural facility arose. At the end of his book, The
Evolved Apprentice, Sterelny (2011: Chap. 8.4, The Holocene e A
world queerer than we realized) confessed that he found it very
difcult to see how to carry the story of human cultural and social
evolution forward into the Holocene. At the completion of the Lucy
to Language project, its co-leaders have sought to do that in the
nal chapter of Thinking Big (Dunbar et al., 2014: Chap. 7, Living in
big societies). Staying within the framework of cultural niche
construction theory, I want to return to the neolithisation process in
southwest Asia, because I believe that we can extend the concept of
cultural niche construction in a way that will help us to understand
the extraordinary transformation that took place over the end of
the Pleistocene (in southwest Asia, the Epipalaeolithic period), and
into the earliest Holocene (the early, or aceramic, Neolithic).
A key feature of that period was the growth of population
density, and in particular the increasing permanence and scale of
population units. There were benets of scale and cooperation as
the size of community grew, but the demands of cooperation would
become more onerous, and living close together in large numbers
could be psychologically and psycho-somatically stressful (Dunbar,
2013; Dunbar et al., 2014). The change from living in a small group
of people who were almost always inter-visible to, and in touch
with, one another to sharing a built settlement within which people
lived in intimate proximity but often out of sight of one another
required signicant psychological adaptation (Wilson, 1988). In
such conditions, the risks of free-riders and cheats grew, together
with the difculty of detecting and the costs of punishing them
(Dubreuil, 2008). The new, large-scale, permanent communities
demanded the reinforcing and strengthening of the norms of social
behaviour, and their extension to accommodate the new situation;
and, more signicantly, it was essential to devise novel kinds of
social institution, in the sense that the philosopher John Searle
denes the term in his work on the construction of social reality,
and as we today live with such constructs as marriage, money,
football, or being good neighbours, or responsible citizens of a
nation-state (Searle, 1995, 1997, 2010).
In this enterprise, material culture in monumental form served a
purpose in the emergent, large-scale communities and networks of
communities of southwest Asia: the cultural dimension of cognition began to take new and powerful material forms, and at
different scales. The social exchange networks of materials such as

obsidian or marine shells were present from the Upper Palaeolithic,

but grew in intensity through the Epipalaeolithic and particularly
the early Neolithic periods. Communities shared their values for
such materials, and the exchanged things demonstrated that people belonged within, and actively shared membership of, extensive
networks of communities (Watkins, 2008). They also shared values
for other material goods, such as intricately stylised projectile
points (now valued by lithics specialists for their typological potential). We have only recently come to know of the existence of the
large, circular, subterranean communal buildings at the centre of a
number of early Neolithic settlement sites. We have yet to investigate how the forms that they took and the labours that were
involved in their creation embodied meanings, equally, the functions that they accommodated remain elusive. It is notable that
many of these massive constructions were ceremonially deconstructed and buried at the end of their lives; and it seems to me
bekli Tepe were not
that the massive circular enclosures at Go
designed to accommodate large-scale ceremonies. Further, given
the way that the multi-ton pairs of central monoliths were carefully
poised vertically, it is improbable that they were designed to stand
indenitely; these were not monuments in the sense that we today
commonly think of monuments as creations that are revered for
their antiquity, as much as their scale, grandeur, or symbolic
signicance.
One function of one of the communal structures at Jerf el Ahmar
has been determined: its doorless cells had served as a communal
bulk storage facility for harvested wild cereals and lentils (Willcox
and Stordeur, 2012). But how the open oor area of the rest of the
structure, consisting of carefully demarcated, low platforms, was
intended to function remains unclear; and we are still quite unclear
about the intended function of the other communal buildings at Jerf
el Ahmar and elsewhere. Equally, we are still groping to grasp
whatever meanings were encoded in their complex forms. What is
impressive, however, is the huge amounts of labour and attention
that were devoted both to their construction and their deconstruction and obliteration. It seems to me that the communal
rituals of construction, the making of symbols, the reconstructions,
and the nal deconstructions may have been the main purpose,
rather than the creation of spaces within rituals or ceremonies
could take place (Watkins, in press-b, in press-a). Such shared,
communal labours could serve as the commitment mechanisms,
the means of costly signalling, and at the same time the assurance
of shared values and ideology (Sterelny and Watkins, 2015).
4. The cognitive-cultural niche
The new kind of cultural niche that people began to build was a
cognitively powerful form of cultural niche construction. For a very
long time in human evolution, the human cultural niche had
comprised an element of ensuring that the cultural knowledge of
the community was effectively transmitted to the new generation.
The mechanisms that served apprentice learning have been well
described by Sterelny (2011). In this sense the cultural niche was
also a cognitive niche, involving, as Sterelny called it, epistemic
engineering. The evolution of language, and particularly the
emergence of fully modern language within the last 100,000 years,
has been of great cognitive importance to the cultural niche, as
linguists have been eager to explain (e.g. Pinker 1994, 2010;
Bickerton, 2009).
In that sense, the cognitive-cultural niche had been in existence
for a long time before the transformational period with which we
are concerned here. As Pinker (1994: opening paragraph) has
expressed it, the faculty of language enables humans to shape
events in each other's brains with exquisite precision. In the new,
large, permanently co-resident communities, however, speech was

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T. Watkins / Quaternary International xxx (2015) 1e7

not enough; there was a need to store, share and transmit information and ideas that could be the common knowledge of a great
number of people. Human social groups depend on the condence
of members in the reliability and cooperation of others. In smallscale groups, whose numbers are small, each can track the behaviour and relations of others. In large-scale groups, and particularly
in networks of groups, there need to be ways of ensuring that all
share conventions of behaviour, and all can condent that others
can be expected to cooperate appropriately, and even behave
altruistically when required.
While sharing in rituals is a common way of ensuring group
harmony, there is a school of thought that argues that there is a
correlation between large-scale communities and very prominent
and demanding religious beliefs and practices. The emergence of
demanding rituals is argued to be a necessary vehicle for costly
commitment displays (for example, Henrich, 2009; Bulbulia and
Frean, 2010; Bulbulia and Sosis, 2011). Henrich (2009: 247e8)
discusses how societies conserve and transmit prosocial behaviours
through the establishment of leading gures who serve as examplars for emulation; such gures emerge through their performance of costly acts of commitment, which he terms CREDS e
credibility enhancing displays. Bulbulia and Sosis (2011) also
discuss the role of costly signalling of commitment in promoting
general prosociality; demanding rituals in particular constitute
occasions for credibility enhancing displays for their leading participants, in addition to their capacity for arousal, focusing group
attention, exciting memory, and corporate strengthening (Bulbulia
and Sosis, 2011: 365). However, such costly signalling cannot work
in communities that are too large or too dispersed to allow for the
sustained interaction between individuals that accommodate the
necessary observation and learning processes. Bulbulia and Sosis
(2011: 373) turn to cultural niche construction theory, arguing
that it allows the possibility of creating exogenous designs that
express and synchronise the cooperative motives of a large community of people who rarely come into contact with one another.
They call this sophisticated form of cultural niche the cooperative
niche, since one can imagine that it can evolve to strongly govern
the behaviour of cooperative populations, ofoading strategic
control from individuals to the information properties of their
worlds (Bulbulia and Sosis, 2011: 380). The key phrase is that
ofoading to the information properties of their worlds. Here, I
would argue that the making, re-modelling, remaking, and nally
replacement of large-scale communal monuments, such as those at
bekli Tepe, or the communal buildings within settlements such
Go
as Jerf el Ahmar, constitute the extravagant ritual performances
that are communal acts of costly commitment.
Their further purpose was the building of community identity
and the sharing of cultural memory by means of new kinds of often
visually striking symbolic representation. In seeking how to understand changes in the human modes of symbolic communication
over evolutionary time, our best guide is Merlin Donald, who has
linked the process of human social evolution with developments in
human cognition and changes in the way that humans have
communicated (Donald, 1991, 2001). What he proposed is a trajectory of cognitive and cultural co-evolution that has allowed
human communities to grow in scale and complexity. The key
feature for us modern humans is our facility with material systems
of symbolic representation. Donald calls it theoretic culture,
characterised, in his terms, by external symbolic storage. For us in
today's world, the most familiar, exible and powerful forms of
external symbolic storage are written language, the printed book,
the eebook, or mathematical or musical notation. But Donald says
that people had learned how to make repositories of symbolic
cultural memory through art, sculpture, and architecture before
external symbolic storage was applied to language to create written

language (Donald, 2006). Elsewhere, he wrote that, symbolizing

minds, as we know them, are not self-sufcient neural devices, as
are eyes. They are hybrid products of a brain-culture symbiosis.
Without cultural programming, they could never become symbolizing organs (Donald, 2000: 23).
We e and our nal Pleistocene and earliest Holocene predecessors, because of the large-scale societies in which they began
to live e depend on an intense enculturation process. While some
of that enculturation process for us is explicit and formal (in the
form of schools and universities, or apprenticeships, for example),
much of it takes place below the horizon of conscious awareness; it
is a subject that Donald (2001) has investigated and described
wondrously. It seems to me that Donald has in mind a profoundly
affecting human cultural niche, although he does not specically
refer to cultural niche construction theory. The new, large, permanent communities of that time needed symbols of collective
identity and shared cultural memory. The cognitive-cultural niche
that they evolved was essential to support their networks of large,
permanent communities. Cultural niche construction, as described,
for example, by Sterelny (2011), taught how to shape an arrowhead,
how to make an arrow, how to track, how to hunt, how to butcher,
how to cook. Cultural niche construction taught how to build and
maintain a house, but cognitive-cultural niche construction
instructed how to understand household as an institution, the
norms of behaviour expected both within the household, but also
how to regard neighbours, and how to recognize other, more
distant groups as members of one's super-extended network.
Within the cultural niche the individual learned to harvest, store,
process and cook cereals and legumes, but the cognitive niche
taught how the communal food-store was an expression of community cooperation and trust.
Humans had been making and using signs and symbols for tens of
thousands of years. For some tens of thousands of years humans had
been in possession of a fully modern language capacity, implying
that they had the cognitive capacity to think recursively (Corballis,
2011), with all the cognitive sophistication that follows from being
able to think, communicate and share through a fully modern language ('mythic' culture, in the terms of Donald, 1991). But, for the
rst time in human evolution, communities had devised material
systems of symbolic representation. The cognitive-cultural niche
was made of things that have meaning, and actions that make
meaning. Material culture began to play an extended and major role
in the symbolic construction of community (a deliberate allusion to
Cohen, 1985) and cultural memory (Watkins, 2012). In many ways,
we can recognize the emergence of cultural and cognitive skills at
this period that are integral to our own experience. At the same time,
we can see that the systems of symbolic representation on which we
depend, and which shape our ideas, thoughts, and understanding
(whether printed books, newspapers, or tweets) are different from
theirs. The cognitive-cultural niche and its material systems of
symbolic representation that we have been learning about from
recent excavations in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria operated somewhat differently, with different uses of symbolic material
culture, from the form that operated in other parts of southwest Asia
at the same time. Thus, there is no universal formula for the cultural
relations of the material dimension to mind.
Acknowledgements
The research that underpins this article was undertaken in the
context of the research programme Our Place: Our Place in the
World, funded by the John Templeton Foundation 20696, of which
the author and the late Prof. Klaus Schmidt are the co-directors. In
particular, this work has greatly benetted from collaboration with
Prof. Kim Sterelny, who has been an active participant in the Our

Please cite this article in press as: Watkins, T., The cultural dimension of cognition, Quaternary International (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.quaint.2015.02.049

T. Watkins / Quaternary International xxx (2015) 1e7

Place research programme. The original article has been much

improved by the helpful advice and comments of reviewers, and
the Guest Editor, Duilio Garofoli. I am grateful to them for the time
that they have given and the trouble that they have taken, and to
Antonis Iliopoulos for his invitation to contribute, and his encouragement and support.
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