Testing the cognitive implications of symbiotic technologies from the Middle Stone Age: a pilot neurological approach

• Main Author: Williams, Victoria Mary Elizabeth
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Hunting; Archery; Electroencephalography
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/11017

M.A. (Anthropology) === Thus far, the earliest convincing evidence for the production and use of bow-and-arrow technology has been associated with Homo sapiens who lived ~64 ka in southern Africa. In contrast to a single-component wooden spear or a composite stone-tipped spear, bow-and-arrow utilisation – where one composite tool is required to effectively use another – could signify higher levels of cognitive complexity and behavioural flexibility. Lombard and Haidle (2012) postulate that a novel cognitive component is evident in technological symbiosis, i.e., the ability to focus simultaneously and actively on manipulating a complementary set of tools that are independent from one another, but are used as an effective unit to obtain a single goal. For example, when a bow is used to fire an arrow to obtain meat. In the current pilot study, I investigated the validity of Lombard and Haidle’s (2012) hypothesis of technological symbiosis from a neurological perspective. Electroencephalography (EEG) equipment recorded cortical activity (within the parietal, frontal midline and orbitofrontal cortices), when each of the participants (n. = 4) engaged in three non-symbiotic and symbiotic tasks. The purpose of the pilot experiment was to measure levels of cortical activity with non-symbiotic and symbiotic tool use in an attempt to assess whether greater ‘neural effort’ was needed for the symbiotic tasks. These results suggest that executive functions (attention, active-inhibition, context updating, reinforcement learning and memory rehearsal) were enhanced when the participants engaged in the symbiotic bow-and-arrow task, as opposed to the non-symbiotic spear task. Furthermore, an increase in white matter (found within the prefrontal cortex), as opposed to changes in brain structure size, might be responsible for the complex executive functions that are identified in our species. Future research on the effects that task practice has on cortical dynamics (patterns of cortical activity) might be beneficial – for instance, it might help us understand the ways in which neural pathways are restructured, rewired or altered with repeated exposure to cognitively demanding activities.