Larissa Straffon

University of Bergen | UiB · Faculty of Psychology

Over the past three decades, hypotheses that aim at explaining the origins of art from an evolutionary perspective have thrived. Proving particularly popular are those which put forward sexual selection, social cohesion, or cognitive enhancement as the primary selective contexts in which visual art prospered throughout human evolution. Such proposa...

Morin envisions the adaptive landscape of graphic codes as an unfertile valley where writing rises as an isolated peak that humans managed to reach only on four occasions throughout all of history. By exploring the different paths to cultural convergence, we suggest an alternative landscape occupied by a mountain range of visual art systems. We con...

Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture...

Learning to draw is an important developmental milestone that most children achieve during their preschool years. Primary caregivers play a significant role in supporting this process, which may affect the pace of acquisition and subsequent unfolding of drawing ability. In this study, we aimed to investigate parental support in the context of child...

The emergence of symbolic behavior is often considered a hallmark development in hominin evolution, ultimately giving rise to the complex communicative practices, abstract reasoning patterns, aesthetic discourses and religious institutions surrounding us today. In recent years, archaeologists have provided substantial evidence for the remarkable ti...

This issue invites a dialogue across fields to develop multidisciplinary approaches that can connect theories of how minds evolved with theories of how the process of cognitive evolution may be traced, reconstructed, tested, and explained through evidence from bones, artefacts, actions, genes, and brains. We welcome contributions from cognitive, bi...

Ochre is a mineral pigment that has been used by humans for more than 300,000 years. It appears in archaeological, historical, and contemporary settings across vast distances of time and space, and increasing evidence shows ochre use by ancestral hominins as well as by certain animal species. Because of its unique behavioral, functional, contextual...

Symbolic cognition—the ability to produce and use symbols, including (but not limited to) linguistic symbols—has often been considered a hallmark of human achievement. Given its importance, symbolic cognition has been a major topic of interest in many academic disciplines including anthropology, archeology, and the cognitive sciences.1–6 Paleolithi...

Drawing is first learned and practised in the home environment, and therefore parental influence should play a significant role in the development of drawing skill. However, both the content and extent of parental support for drawing have been understudied. Since drawing promotes children's cognitive, creative, and academic development, it seems va...

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 thoug...

We investigated visual attentional biases toward self-made artworks. Self-made objects tend to be favored, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. On this basis, we set out to test whether the effects of self-relevance would apply to visual art, and via what mechanisms. In three studies, participant...

The fact that world-over people seem inexplicably motivated to allocate time and effort to apparently useless cultural practices, like the arts, has led several evolutionary scholars to suggest that these might be costly Zahavian signals correlated with genetic fitness, such as the infamous peacock’s tail. In this paper, I review the fundamental ar...

Ethological and evolutionary approaches to art and culture have become commonplace, and nowadays constitute a thriving multidisciplinary field of research. However, some commentators from the humanities still argue that studying the arts as behaviour means reducing them to mere biological mechanisms. In this essay, I argue that such objections stem...

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 evolution...

The symbolic capacity is generally considered a modern human trait that underlies many aspects of the characteristic complex mental abilities of our species – such as abstract thinking, planning depth, and behavioural innovativeness. In this paper I discuss data from archaeology, developmental and comparative psychology which indicates that, contra...

In recent decades, phylogenetic methods originated in evolutionary biology have been put forward as fruitful strategies to trace and reconstruct the origin, development, distribution, and interrelatedness of archaeological artifacts and traditions. Artifact phylogenies are increasingly being used by archaeologists to infer, develop, and test hypoth...

El presente trabajo reúne diversas manifestaciones rupestres de la sierra de San Francisco (península de Baja California, México), con el objetivo de exponer algunos ejemplos de la temática vinculada al ámbito astronómico (cosmogónico). En 1981, al iniciar nuestras visitas por esta área del noroeste mexicano, nos percatamos de contenidos astronómic...

A partir del análisis de contextos arqueológicos con restos humanos y las manifestaciones rupestres del Paleolítico Superior europeo, se proponen dos principales formas de tratamiento mortuorio; uno dirigido a la dispersión y eventual desaparición de los difuntos y otro centrado en su preservación y retención. En el primero se observa una tendencia...

This paper argues that visual art coevolved with typically human ways of social organization and cooperation strategies. My argument, in brief, is that Late Pleistocene human groups became organised in band societies that established networks of indirect reciprocal cooperation, which favoured cultural strategies of individual recognition such as so...

Inferring and explaining cultural patterns and the ways in which human groups relate and interact over large spans of time or space is one of the biggest challenges for archaeologists. When dealing with either the remote past or the present, researchers struggle to learn about the conditions and mechanisms by which cultural traits originate, move,...

UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2 November 2001) defines culture with an emphasis on cultural features: “culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group”, encompassing, “in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living togethe...

A group of international top scientists from a diversity of disciplines sat together for five days with artists, designers, and entrepreneurs to develop a trans-disciplinary theory of creativity. Organic Creativity and the Physics Within assumes that creativity is a quality of nature visible in physics as well as in psychology, its basis being comb...

In this paper we offer several interpretations of a Great Mural rock art panel in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Known as Cueva de la Serpiente, the painted rock shelter is found in Arroyo del Parral, within the San Francisco Sierra. The panel composition, thematic, color pallet, and site orientation are all important indicators when attempting inter...

En este estudio se plantea una serie de interpretaciones en torno a uno de los conjuntos rupestres más enigmáticos y sugestivos del Gran Mural, situado en Baja California Sur, México. El sitio es conocido como Cueva de la Serpiente y se ubica en el arroyo del Parral en la Sierra de San Francisco. Tanto la temática como la paleta de color y la orien...