Projekt

Paleolithic stone artefacts have survived millennia of human evolution and provide a unique opportunity to chart the development of human technology on timescales unattainable for other technologies or periods. Yet paradoxically, Paleolithic stone artefact research remains ill-equipped to advance basic knowledge on how technology evolves over the very long term and why - key issues in long-standing debates on the place of humans in the increasingly technologized worlds of today and tomorrow. The project responds to this lacuna and develops a new theoretical framework for investigating deep-time macro-evolutionary trajectories of technology. It proposes to envisage groups of co-existing stone artefact technologies as integrated ecosystems. This perspective has not previously been considered as research has routinely concentrated on individual stone artefacts, assemblages thereof, or isolated technological lineages. The ecosystem view allows to build bridges to emerging insights in evolutionary theory as well as humanities and social science perspectives on the nature of technology and its evolution. The project probes into this potential, deploys new computational modelling techniques to explore the consequences of radical ecosystem evolution, and tests this perspective by re-analysing well-researched regional technological sequences in Paleolithic Europe to inspire an entirely new way of studying and understanding large-scale technological evolution in the human deep past and beyond.

• Dr. Shumon Tobias Hussain

  Universität zu Köln
  Philosophische Fakultät
  MESH & Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte
  Köln