ABSTRACT
Archaeology has a vital role to play in the wider palaeoanthropological endeavour to understand hominid evolution since it provides the only direct evidence for the behaviour of our ancestors and their relatives. As Glynn Isaac (1972, 1976a, 1983) made clear, the ultimate goal of hominid archaeology is to stimulate and test explanations for hominid evolution. Over the past twenty years researchers have sought to accomplish this ultimate goal through the intermediate goal of behavioural reconstruction (e.g. Isaac 1978). While very real advances have been made in identifying specific hominid activities, it is still proving difficult to reconstruct the wider behavioural context of such activities. The source of this difficulty has been identified by recent work on the structure of the East African Lower Palaeolithic archaeological record which suggests that the goal of behavioural reconstruction is not commensurable with the nature of the available evidence. This chapter assesses the implications of the mismatch between goals and data for the attempt to explain hominid evolution. First, a review of the current inferential strategy leads to the conclusion that inference about the wider organization of hominid activities is unreliable owing to a debilitating lack of temporal resolution. The second section argues that progress will require a greater understanding of the mechanisms and rates of hominid behavioural change. Only then will it be possible to establish whether the conflation of behavioural episodes across tens of thousands of years is acceptable. The final section argues that computer simulation has a vital role to play in exploring the mechanisms underlying behavioural change, and thus in assessing the viability of behavioural reconstruction as a route to the explanation of hominid evolution.
