Most well-accepted models of cognitive evolution define the modern human mind in terms of an amalgamation of species-specific cognitive mechanisms, many of which are described as adaptive. Likewise, these models often use the rich archaeological record of Homo sapiens to illustrate how ‘uniquely human’ mental abilities gave our species an evolutionary advantage over extinct hominins. Recent evidence from various fields, however, indicates that closely related species, particularly Neanderthals and Denisovans, likely had cognitive capacities very similar to ours, and that several key aspects of ‘modern’ cognition are not exclusive to our lineage. The sum of these data therefore requires a timely revision of human cognitive evolution models. On the one hand, claims of species-specific cognitive mechanisms have been weakened. On the other hand, there are tangible differences among extinct and extant humans that call for an explanation. One way to accommodate these differences is to understand cognition as shaped by sociocultural and environmental factors, and to argue for culture-specific rather than species-specific cognition over the course of human evolution.

In the field of cognitive archaeology, the origin of art has been recurrently explained as a result of the transition to a fully symbolic mind in our species, H. sapiens. Recent data is challenging that view as increasing evidence shows that the cognitive differences between ‘premodern’ and modern human populations are smaller than previously thought. Yet, possible cases of Neanderthal and other hominin art are few and far between, rendering artistic practices mainly a H. sapiens phenomenon. To explain this, it is necessary to redefine art and understand it not only as the product of cognitive operations, but as a behavior embedded in modern human social interactions.

Attempts to recover and reconstruct the origins of mathematics have traditionally focused on identifying evidence of early notational systems of quantification. We aim to show in this paper that archaeological material culture can offer an alternate, more tangible source of information about mathematical knowledge in the deep past, especially when it is paired with ethnographic and cross-cultural data. In addition, when linked to the cognitive science of mathematics, it can support inferences about how humans first began to grasp, learn, and apply mathematical ideas. We focus on fibre technologies and weaving crafts as prime examples of activities that contain and afford mathematical knowledge, in response to Lakoff & Núñez's call to explore the common practices that underlie mathematical ideas and to rethink mathematics as grounded in human experience.

Cumulative culture is believed to be a uniquely human form of social learning, and is therefore believed to be key in understanding how humans evolved such complex social organization and technologies. It is reasonable to believe that our capacity for cumulative culture is the result of a series of interconnected, complex evolutionary processes, but humans abilities for teaching, imitation and communication are believed to play a central role. We plan on combining brain imaging techniques and a transmissions chain design with transmission of evolutionary relevant tasks (knot tying and symbol-production) in order to look at the mechanisms of cumulative culture in a new way. By looking at the brain activation involved in acquiring and transferring these skills we aim to offer new insight on the cognitive and behavioral demands of these technologies and their effect on cultural evolution.

Advances in a wide variety of disciplines have begun to tackle the challenge of finding out what happens to which cognitive systems to allow us to develop numerical abilities, yielding mountains of data ripe with explanatory promise (Cohen Kadosh & Dowker 2015). The development of novel experimental methods have allowed ethologists and developmental psychologists to probe into the cognitive abilities and systems operating in preverbal infants and nonhuman animals, hinting at the boundary between our innate cognitive machinery and those formal abilities we develop by interacting with our cultural niche (Carey 2009). Uniting behavioral and brain data has produced strong support for the existence of cognitive systems recruited in the development of our formal numerical abilities (Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., & Spelke, E. 2004).