Matthew Walls

The Acheulean techno-complex represents a significant chapter in hominin cognitive evolution. Two important developments include enchained technological behaviours that were practiced with broad consistency over thousands of generations, and the expansion of hominins into dynamic Pleistocene environments, well beyond their evolutionary origins. In this paper we expand on Material Engagement Theory to argue that the making and use of Acheulean tools generates social forms that are emergent outcomes of complex technical practice. We introduce three key features of this sociality, which form the basis of what we term Technologically Emergent Communities of Practice. These features include (1) enactive alignment, the synchronization of materially mediated experience and intentionality; (2) techno-intercorporeality, the shared dispositions and awareness through which communities respond with environmental change; and (3) tool-dependent ontology, the non-representational ordering of being and relationality that guides collective environmental cognition among users of a technology. Understood as an early example of such a community, the Acheulean represents an evolutionary shift in the relationship between hominins and their environments, characterized by novel cybernetic processes of feedback, memory, and responsiveness. We argue that for Acheulean communities, this emergent sociality—scaffolded by technological practice—enabled an ecological creativity that is expressed in the eventual radiation and resilience of hominins across dynamic Pleistocene environments that stretched across Africa, Asia and Europe. By conceptualizing the Acheulean as an emergent sociality, we link enactivism, niche expansion and ecological agency. This framework sheds light on the evolution of sociality and offers a new direction to explore the genesis of coupled human-environment systems.

In this paper, I draw on postphenomenology and material engagement theory to consider the material and emergent character of sociality in Homo faber. I approach this through the context of the bow and arrow, which is a technology that has received recent attention in cognitive archeology as a proxy for assessing criteria that made early human cognition distinct from that of other hominins. Through an ethnographic case study, I scrutinize the forms of knowledge that are required to use the technology in the dynamic field of environmental practices that constitute the hunt. I demonstrate that the learning of the skill is a transformational process where beginners develop self and intentionality by attuning subjective capacities for sensory awareness and creative responsiveness. Through mutual participation, the bow and arrow aligns disposition and rapport among those whose life processes are shaped by the skill. As a mechanism of shared experience, the bow and arrow generates a community can together perceive and act creatively in an impermanent world. Through these observations, I argue that early human sociality was built not on a pre-evolved capacity for symbolic representation but on technical experience, and I consider important questions this raises about the nature of evolutionary processes at work in the development of communities through time.