ABSTRACT
The first generation of cognitive anthropology was born from a marriage of anthropology and linguistics, particularly the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, and the work of Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures and his 1959 obliteration of the behaviorist account of language. The question of the evolution of cognition and of culture is not an altogether novel one. The full analysis of the biocultural evolution of human cognition requires psychological anthropology to recruit a number of allied disciplines, including physical anthropology, archaeology, and primatology. Coolidge and Wynn further determine that tremendous leaps in human cognition can be seen in the tool record. Wynn and Coolidge have used cognitive archaeological concepts and methods to speculate on the personality of a particular prehuman species, the Neanderthals. The final frontier for anthropology is to integrate contemporary cognitive anthropology and neuroanthropology with the discipline's traditional vocation of ethnography.
