3 ms·
instead of decades of "who uses tools" maybe it would be more modern to consider what cognitive requirements exist for dreaming up using tools, in some more rig
by jjtheblunt 4y ago
instead of decades of "who uses tools" maybe it would be more modern to consider what cognitive requirements exist for dreaming up using tools, in some more rigorous manner, perhaps mathematical.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoAnthropologists have been trying to do that for decades, beginning with chaînes opératoires approaches in the 70s, to Haidle's cognigram approach ([0]), to the explicitly comp-sci inspired approaches like Perrault's [1]. They tend to suffer from the same set of issues, namely that they tend to be difficult to consistently apply within reasonable epistemological frameworks and unspecific in their arguments/predictions. Even when you have those, you still need to ground-truth things with the material record of "who was using tools when", so the kind of work discussed in the linked article remains valuable. [0] https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977431200025X https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977431200025X [1] https://doi.org/10.1086/673264 https://doi.org/10.1086/673264
- mkl 4y agoEven if you had rigorous knowledge of the cognitive requirements, how would you verify its accuracy without going out and seeing who uses tools? How would you identify species meeting the cognitive requirements without seeing who uses tools (even if only in an artificial puzzle-solving context)?
- jjtheblunt 4y agogood questions, i agree!