Recursive Narrative and the Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic Transition

Abstract Acheulean bifaces were the defining technological component of a successful hominin adaptation for well over a million years. Their replacement by Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technology from around 300,000 years ago across much of the Old World was a major threshold in human behavioral evolution, associated with the emergence of the large-brained hominins Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and Homo sapiens in Africa. This chapter reviews some of the lithic technology evidence for the Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic transition in four regions: northwestern Europe, the southern Levant, central India, and east Africa. Knapping technology in these regions suggests the transition may have been initially underpinned by compound embedding of discrete concepts within a single sequence to generate hierarchical complexity—an example of generativity or nested recursion. Subsequently, early Middle Palaeolithic knappers employed feedback loops where a discrete output was also the input for a return to an earlier stage in the sequence, allowing for the production of multiple distinct tools within a single sequence and the hafting of some of those tools. These feedback loops in which a discrete concept is embedded within a concept of equivalent category are an example of meta-recursion or center-embedded recursion. Both generativity and meta-recursion are fundamental to narrative communication. It is hypothesized that Middle Palaeolithic landscape use strategies are archaeological manifestations of narrative communication.