Pleistocene archaeology

Massimo Pigliucci, in attempting to dig himself out of one hole, has only compounded his error (see Letters to the Editor, July/August 2006). George Wood took him to task for failing to appreciate the richness of the archaeological record in gaining an understanding of human bicultural evolution. In response, Pigliucci declared that the time period of interest for evolutionary psychologists is the Pleistocene epoch, which is "well outside of any reliable archaeological record."

I realize that whenever an author ventures out of his area of particular expertise, he is in danger of making the occasional blunder, and while I don't wish to discourage such stimulating and often fruitful forays, Pigliucci's willingness to dismiss, with a rhetorical wave of his hand, the entire Pleistocene and Pliocene archaeological records as unreliable is foolish. He may declare his opinion that the evolutionary psychologists inferences from these data are unreliable, but to claim that any archaeological manifestations that date to the Pleistocene epoch, or earlier, are somehow beyond the pale is not a sustainable proposition.

Even if Pigliucci merely intended to suggest that reliable inferences about ancient human behavior become increasingly less reliable as the age of the archaeological record increases, I would take exception to the claim. The archaeological record certainly has inherent limitations, and it is subject to numerous biases relating to preservation and discovery of relevant data, but the limitations on our ability to extract reliable interpretations from such data as we are able to recover lie in our methods and theories. As these increase in sophistication, our inferences about ancient human behavior, whether Pleistocene or more recent, will become richer and more reliable.

For an introduction to the reliable knowledge modern archaeology has generated about Pleistocene and earlier human biocultural evolution, I refer Pigliucci and other interested readers to the early chapters of Brian Fagan's magisterial book, People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, and Ken Feder's delightful The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory.

Bradley T. Lepper

Curator of Archaeology

Ohio Historical Society

Columbus, Ohio

Massimo Pigliucci responds:

I thank Lepper for the references on human archaeology, a science that I do not deny the existence of nor its value in helping us understand our past. In part, this is a debate about terminology: I think of archaeology as dealing with much more recent, historical, human artifacts, while leaving the study of human fossils to paleontology or paleoanthropology. But, of course, this is a matter of semantics and, therefore, not very substantial.

More important is my claim that no evidence about the human fossil record archaeological or paleontological, as the case may be-can actually be used to test the very specific ideas about the evolution of human behaviors and cognition put forth by evolutionary psychologists. This, of course, does not mean that we know nothing about past cultures (or, indeed, even that evolutionary psychology's theories are wrong). But to claim that our inferences about the cognitive abilities of Pleistocene humans will in time "become richer and more reliable" strikes me as a statement of faith, or, at best, as a very optimistic view of the progress of science. The point remains that such inferences are, at the moment, highly questionable, to say the least.

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