Clive Gamble (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Did Neanderthals cry when they buried their dead? Was Homo heidelbergensis a moral hominin? The importance of emotion in evolution was recognised by Darwin but has been steadfastly ignored by archaeologists. As a result all the interesting questions in human evolution are currently being answered by evolutionary psychologists, philosophers, linguists and neuro-imagers. What is left to the archaeologist is the caricature of our ancestors as ‘brain dead and stomach led’; creatures more concerned with calories than consciousness. In this paper I will return emotions to our earliest ancestors by exploring the social brain hypothesis; that our social lives drove the process of brain enlargement. I will focus on the encephalisation event 600,000 years ago and argue that emotions were the core around which hominins scaffolded their varied social lives. In particular, second order emotions such as guilt and shame correspond to higher levels of intentionality that are first indicated in the fossil record at the time of the encephalisation event. From a social brain perspective we see that archaeologists took a wrong turning when they came to define the modern mind through its ability to process symbols. This is evident in the false turnings taken both by supporters of a Human Revolution and those Neolithic archaeologists who believe in a sapient paradox. Instead we need to rediscover the world of bodily experience and the material metaphors this has supported through a distributed rather than an internal cognition.