(Istituto Italiano di Antropologia, 2017) Lombard, Marlize; Gardenfors, Peter
We suggest a seven-grade model for the evolution of causal cognition as a framework that
can be used to gauge variation in the complexity of causal reasoning from the panin-hominin split until the
appearance of cognitively modern hunter-gatherer communities. The intention is to put forward a cohesive
model for the evolution of causal cognition in humans, which can be assessed against increasingly finegrained
empirical data from the palaeoanthropological and archaeological records. We propose that the
tracking behaviour (i.e., the ability to interpret and follow external, inanimate, visual clues of hominins)
provides a rich case study for tracing the evolution of causal cognition in our lineage. The grades of causal
cognition are tentatively linked to aspects of the Stone Age/Palaeolithic archaeological record. Our model
can also be applied to current work in evolutionary psychology and research on causal cognition, so that an
inter-disciplinary understanding and correlation of processes becomes increasingly possible.