Just finished reading Klein and Edgar's "The Dawn of Human Culture" (2002). The crux of the book is that there is a gap between the appearance of anatomically modern humans and the appearance of fully human behavior. The authors suggest that anatomy, at least the type of anatomy detectable in the fossil record, does not account for human behavior but rather language does; it was the acquisition of language after anatomy that allowed humans to create new behaviors and build up human culture. Prior to that, human culture, whether among Neanderthals, erectus, or even Homo sapiens, was very limited, extremely un-inventive, and almost exclusively utilitarian; no art, decorations, etc.

The book is short, and the actual presentation of the core argument is very short. Most of the book reads like a review of the human-like fossils that are out there and the earliest 'stone industries'. The focus is sometimes on Africa, sometimes on Europe, rarely on the rest of the world. And then mostly on Indonesia. The authors excuse this focus on the grounds that there aren't many remains from elsewhere to work with, noting that this is laregley because the focus has been on Europe (by Europeans) and Africa (by Europeans, as part of the African Origins idea). The review seems excellent to me, but they really don't spend much time on their own ideas vis-a-vis language and their putative "dawn of human culture".

The authors also don't care much for a lot of things in paleontology. Relationships between hominid fossils aren't important, behavior is what they care about. Dating-techniques would be more important, if only they weren't so prone to hard-to-correct-for-error. Relationships and time are usually the foundations of a paleontological study, so I was surprised to see this. Its not that the authors reject dating-technology, its not that they don't discuss relationships, its just that they don't really figure into their interpretation of the history all that much.

The authors also don't discuss human genetics very much. To be clear, they do discuss it, but its only import for them is that it supports the out of Africa hypothesis. It doesn't add anything to the timing of human migrations out of Africa, it doesn't help in looking at the spread of humans once out of Africa, it uninformative on the behavior of Neanderthals and erectus, and it doesn't help us to look at the spread of culture once it develops. Human 'paleo-genetics' certainly can inform of about all these things, but the authors don't seem concerned with any of it. True enough, the book was written in 2002, but thats hardly the Dark Ages.

As far as their hypothesis, it ends up falling rather flat. On the one hand, they make a very good case that there is a gap between anatomy and behavior, and it requires a special explanation. But their explanation is simply that fully developed language would appear quickly, undetectably, and that it would necessarily result in the development of culture, art, drawing, complex society, etc.

They don't offer anything in the way of how language developed. They mention that some people have a 'defective' gene, and because of this they have trouble processing language, but are otherwise intelligent. So we're left to conclude that they believe human culture is the result of one or two, maybe a few, new genes 'for language'. They require us to assume that culture comes after language, and that language is the necessary and sufficient ingredient for culture.

For those reasons, this book was disappointing, that is to say it disappointed me on those topics. On others, it was quite satisfying. The review of the actual fossils that have been collected was great, and the review of the earliest stone cultures/industries was also great, they make the book well worth the read.