Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archeology is one of the few disciplines likely to provide hints about when the faculty of language evolved in the human lineage. Nevertheless, what can be inferred from the material culture and bony remains of our ancestors is still disputed. This chapter focuses on one debate that has received significant attention recently. Is it possible to infer “symbolic behavior” from the material culture of early Homo sapiens during the ca. 300 to 30 ka Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa? We argue that the question is answered differently depending on how we perceive the cognitive foundation of symbolic behavior. Our view is that symbolic behavior in humans stems from human-specific socio-cognitive and socio-affective skills. We then argue that the presence of these capacities – and indirectly of symbolic behavior – is evidenced by a range of innovations in the southern African archeological record during the MSA. During this period, and especially after ca. 100 ka, groups of early Homo sapiens began to invest significant time and energy in the nonidiosyncratic alteration of the appearance of their material culture. They made use of personal ornaments, produced abstract engravings, and included a stylistic component in their bone and stone tools. Some of the technology they used to produce their tools was highly innovative. Probably for the first time in prehistory our ancestors began to live in societies in which people cared about how others saw the world and about transforming their environment in a way that met others’ expectations. In other words, they lived in a world of shared meanings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it