Die Entstehung einer Figurine?

Abstract

Circa 280,000 years ago, a human picked up a piece of scoria on the Golan Heights in the Levant. To our modern mind, well-trained in perceiving figures in non-figurative contexts, this object’s natural form roughly resembles part of a human female body.The individual took a stone tool and scratched along natural lines, thus accentuating the human-like appearance. Based on depictions in cognigrams, in this paper we compare several reconstructions of the sequence of perceptions and actions that might have led to the figurine of Berekhat Ram.The reconstructions are discussed with special regard to material engagement and embodied cognition in the developmental process. The piece, unique in its time period, is a product of a human performance with physical, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. As such, it is set within the frame of the EECC (Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities) model and examined regarding the interplay of evolutionary-biological, historical-social, and ontogenetic-individual dimensions of development.