bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Pleistocene Record of Making Symbols
Authors: Hovers Erella , Belfer-Cohen Anna 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Symbol making involves active agency, as it is, by definition, intentional and aims to deliver messages, worldviews, and social contents to designated audiences. As archaeology can specify only elements of behavior that are expressed as material objects, it must focus on material objects and their contexts. Accordingly, this chapter does not aim to elucidate the symbolic content of objects. Whether the role of objects is perceived as a clear dichotomy between utilitarian and symbolic or as a “mixed bag,” in the practice of prehistoric archaeology it is the context of artifacts that is often enlisted to provide telltale signs about their role in the behavioral system. Employing archaeological tools (material culture, chronology, and context), the chapter addresses (1) the epistemology of understanding prehistoric symbols by reviewing criteria that are prevalent in the research to assess whether an object may have acted as a symbolic manifestation and (2) the diachronic shift from a cognitive capacity to comprehend and make symbolic objects to a broader, evolved, symbolic behavioral system. Its review of the Pleistocene symbolic record of the Levant suggests that the trajectories of change parallel patterns (though not necessarily the same chronology) observed in neighboring regions. The analysis suggests that rather than changes in the neurological infrastructure per se, the coevolution of symbolic behavior and social complexity is driven by changes in social cognition as a major adaptive tool in hominin cultural evolution.
Redescribing the Oldowan
Authors: Wynn Thomas 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
One of the first evolutionary puzzles addressed in the modern era of cognitive archaeology was the status of the earliest lithic technology, the Oldowan. Did the early hominin stone knappers have a protohuman mind, or did they think more like apes? The chapter first summarizes Mary Leakey’s influential 1967 descriptive typology and follows with accounts of Wynn’s 1981 Piagetian analysis, Toth’s 1985 technical analysis, and a recent tentative application of embodied cognition. The examples illustrate several components of cognitive archaeology’s approach to hominin evolution—the use of explicit general theories and well-articulated middle-range theories, and the important role played by redescriptions of legacy data sets.
Recursive Narrative and the Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic Transition
Authors: Shipton Ceri 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Acheulean bifaces were the defining technological component of a successful hominin adaptation for well over a million years. Their replacement by Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technology from around 300,000 years ago across much of the Old World was a major threshold in human behavioral evolution, associated with the emergence of the large-brained hominins Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and Homo sapiens in Africa. This chapter reviews some of the lithic technology evidence for the Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic transition in four regions: northwestern Europe, the southern Levant, central India, and east Africa. Knapping technology in these regions suggests the transition may have been initially underpinned by compound embedding of discrete concepts within a single sequence to generate hierarchical complexity—an example of generativity or nested recursion. Subsequently, early Middle Palaeolithic knappers employed feedback loops where a discrete output was also the input for a return to an earlier stage in the sequence, allowing for the production of multiple distinct tools within a single sequence and the hafting of some of those tools. These feedback loops in which a discrete concept is embedded within a concept of equivalent category are an example of meta-recursion or center-embedded recursion. Both generativity and meta-recursion are fundamental to narrative communication. It is hypothesized that Middle Palaeolithic landscape use strategies are archaeological manifestations of narrative communication.
Anthropoiesis Revisited
Authors: Witmore Christopher 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter attempts to chart key fusions between humans and nonhumans in the emergence of contemporary humanity. In contrast to theories of externalization in which tools or media were seen as outward and amplified forms of human organs—computer processors improved the human cerebral cortex, writing improved on recollective memory, hammerstones improved the hand, metal choppers improved the incisors—it offers an alternative scenario of human development in terms of symbiosis. In so doing, it argues that every major change in human evolution results from a merger between two autonomous entities (compound objects)—human and nonhuman—which are absorbed into a new (compound) object in a process that might be termed “anthropoiesis.” Working through three very different examples—the exhibition of human evolution in the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, two moments separated by a century in a North Carolina farmhouse, and a driver speeding through the Northern Peloponnese—it sketches out a nonlinear path of anthropoiesis that helps us gain some sense of how we anthropoi continue to change saltationally as myriad humanities in the plural.
Cognitive Archaeology Meets Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
Authors: Pain Ross 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Cecilia Heyes recently developed a novel framework for understanding human cognitive evolution. Contrary to many traditional views, cultural evolutionary psychology argues that distinctively human cognitive traits are transmitted culturally, not biologically. In labeling these mechanisms of thought “cognitive gadgets,” Heyes draws a direct analogy with the cultural artifacts studied by archaeologists. This chapter explores how cultural evolutionary psychology can inform research in cognitive archaeology and vice versa. On the former line of thought, the chapter argues that adopting Heyes’ framework goes some way to addressing the Wynn’s methodological challenge by bringing the categories of the psychological and archaeological sciences closer together. Nonetheless, deep inferential challenges remain. This chapter looks at how we can interpret the record through the lens of cognitive gadgets, using behavioral modernity as a case study. It then examines the way cognitive archaeology can inform research in cultural evolutionary psychology. Using research on the evolution of language, it argues that evidence from cognitive archaeology strengthens Heyes’ case that language is a gadget.
Tool Production, Joint Attention, and the Emergence of Reflective Self-Awareness
Authors: Welshon Rex 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Cognitive archaeologists regularly ask: Unlike other tool-using animals and earlier hominins, how did humans, and perhaps Neandertals, acquire reflective awareness of themselves and their agency? This chapter proposes one part of an answer to that question by focusing on a subset of conscious and attentional states, namely, those conscious states that are states of reflective self-awareness and joint attention. It argues that joint attention played an important causal role in the development of reflective self-awareness and that both joint attention and reflective self-awareness probably became sedimented in hominin populations by no later than 100,000 years ago.
Can the Things That Make Us Smart Outsmart Us?
Authors: Baber Chris 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Taking its cue from Don Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart, this chapter discusses trends in the anticipatory functionality of technology: the ways in which digital artifacts are being given abilities to predict and adapt to users. As the functionality develops, they will be able to anticipate and adapt to human needs (or an interpretation of them). A challenge is knowing not only the device’s “intentions” but also how to intervene if one disagrees. The device is given a degree of agency that feels like a step change in its usage. As well as a question of agency, this example raises questions of transparency (i.e., how to know what the device believes). Increasing the “smartness” of the artifacts carried, worn, or interacts with creates challenges (particularly when devices either fail completely or make erroneous predictions). This could suggest there’s a need for new ways of thinking about tool use to cope with these new breeds of tools. This is assumes that there’s a need for new strategies to address the technologies, and that strategies that have developed from the history of interacting with tools do not apply. While one might assume there is something special about digital technologies and their ability to function as intentional systems, it is plausible that humankind has always responded to tools as if they had intentionality. These questions of belief, intention, and agency might appear solely a matter for digital technology, but this chapter how they also apply to nondigital forms of technology.
Trans and Nonbinary Community Vocal Workshops
Authors: Lipson Julie 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter describes and evaluates vocal workshops for transgender and nonbinary adults. The workshops are presented as an alternative to traditional models of music therapy, informed by non-pathologizing practices of community music therapy and queer and trans music therapy. The workshop structure is described in five sections: (i) establishing comfort, (ii) singing together, (iii) learning, (iv) experimenting and exploring, and (v) closing together with music. Group members explored breath, voice, tension, release, singing, speaking, range, and other elements while gathered in trans community, and with consideration of the broader socio-political context. Quotes from group members are included to demonstrate community needs and the post-workshop impact of the sessions.
Epistemic Privilege and Epistemic Responsibility
Authors: Liboro Renato M. , Lee Colin Andrew 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
From the perspective of standpoint theory, we discuss in this chapter how and why individuals who are in the margins of society, particularly queer and trans folx, are more likely to be equipped to know more and better about marginalization and oppression, as well as the need to address such marginalization and oppression, based on their own difficult experiences related to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Acknowledging their epistemic privilege and epistemic responsibility, many queer and trans music therapists have responded to the inherent call to address the needs of queer and trans folx in music therapy (e.g., fellow therapists, educators, students, and clients) by engaging in scholarship grounded in or based on queer and trans theory and related theoretical perspectives. We further discuss the value of research in terms of their work’s impact on queer and trans music therapy practice, education, and training.
Tchaikovsky in Hollywood. Do We Listen?
Authors: Franklin Peter 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter explores critical questions about the meaning of middlebrow in relation to both musical style and reception. Virginia Woolf’s letter ostensibly denouncing it is subjected to critical scrutiny, relevant to the consideration of a sequence from the 1942 Hollywood movie Now, Voyager, in which Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) appears to be demonstrating a middlebrow version of a highbrow response to a concert performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Remembering that Hollywood movies were “lowbrow” for Woolf but had a potentially “middlebrow” mission for Rubin and others, the analysis probes the brow status of the movie, Charlotte Vale, and Tchaikovsky, leading to a subversive revisiting of Woolf, her letter, and an account by her of an implicitly middlebrow response to highbrow music.
Writing Trivers’s 1972 Theory of Parental Investment and Sexual Selection
Authors: Trivers Robert 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
A brief summary of the most wide-ranging paper of mine, covering the evolution of sex differences in all species. Especially novel is the application to differential mortality by sex, which varies widely across species and higher taxa. The paper provided a framework, anchored in sexual selection and parental investment, for discovering and explaining many sex differences in human mating strategies. The paper has become one of the most widely cited publications in evolutionary biology, accruing more than 17,000 scientific citations as of the year 2022. It is also one of the most widely cited papers in the mushrooming field of evolutionary psychology.
The Interface of Sexual Selection, Conflict, and Evolutionary Psychology
Authors: Perry Jennifer C. , Chapman Tracey 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Evolutionary perspectives from sexual selection and sexual conflict can give powerful insight into the ultimate reasons for the existence of seemingly paradoxical traits such as exaggerated sexual characteristics and sexual exploitation. However, our biological and psychological understanding of such traits is often hampered by a lack of integration across different taxon-focused research fields, as well as by perceived difficulties of integrating human culture into standard evolutionary paradigms. Our aim is address these limitations and to identify emergent, general themes by discussing sexual selection and sexual conflict at the interface of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. We focus mainly on the theme of sexual conflict, which occurs when males and females maximize their evolutionary fitness in different ways. We begin by reviewing core concepts and key examples from diverse species. We then explore whether these ideas can usefully be applied to the study of reproductive interactions in humans. This exercise shows that even theory drawn from the study of animal biology, which focuses only on the evolutionary consequences of sexual interactions, has surprising power to explain diverse facets of human mating behavior.
Extensions of Sexual Strategies Theory across Peoples, Cultures, and Ecologies
Authors: Schmitt David P. 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Evolutionary behavioral scientists have amassed considerable evidence that human mating psychology displays adaptive design, varying in functionally predictable ways across sexes, ages, and socioecologies. Much of this evidence comes from studies of preferential choice, focusing on the specific features, types, and quantities of romantic partners women and men most desire. Women’s mate preferences center, in part, on cues to a man’s ability and willingness to provide resources. These preferences are usually stronger among women in harsh environments, and among women who themselves are feminine, attractive, traditional, and heterosexual. Men’s mate preferences center, in part, on cues to youth and fecundity. These preferences are usually stronger among men in cultures that are less safe, less healthy, and possess more pathogens, and are stronger among men who themselves are masculine, wealthy, and possess higher testosterone. Several concerns with cross-cultural comparisons of human mating psychology have presented challenges to evolutionary scientists. Ultimately, cross-cultural tests of hypothesized human mating adaptations provide the most evidentiary value when embedded in detailed theoretical rationale for why the mechanisms should generate predictable patterns at multiple levels—across individuals, across groups, across cultures, and across time.
Incest Avoidance Adaptations
Authors: Lieberman Debra , Patrick Carlton 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Humans, like many social species, interact with genetic relatives throughout periods of sexual maturity increasing the chance that, barring systems motivating avoidance, close genetic relatives could select one another as sexual partners. However, although suitable in several respects, close genetic relatives represent poor sexual partners due to selection pressures posed by short-generation pathogens and lethal recessive mutations. For this reason, it is likely natural selection crafted information-processing circuitry—mental software—that enabled inferential systems to estimate the probability another individual was a close genetic relative and to trade off this information against other factors influencing fitness to adaptively identify suitable sexual partners. In this chapter we discuss incest avoidance adaptations and provide a model of how human mate choice might operate.
Parental Influence over Mate Choice
Authors: Apostolou Menelaos 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Across different cultures and times, parents exercise considerable influence over their children’s mating decisions. This chapter examines why and how parents influence mate choice, and the evolutionary implications of such influence. In particular, it will be argued that, from the perspective of parents, there is an opportunity cost arising from allowing children to exercise mate choice on their own, which motivates parents to influence mate choice in order to reduce it. In the preindustrial context, parents influenced mate choice more directly, through social institutions such as arranged marriage, which is examined in detail. In postindustrial societies, such as the United States, parents exercise influence indirectly through manipulation, and this chapter examines the manipulation tactics they employ. There are reasons to believe that parental influence has been strong for the greatest part of human evolution, which is likely to have affected the evolutionary trajectory of several mechanisms or adaptations involved in mating. The present chapter discusses some of these adaptations and how they have been affected by the transition to the postindustrial environment, where parental influence over mating is much weaker.
Violent Mates
Authors: Duntley Joshua D. 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
The optimal fitness outcomes of mating relationships often differ for men and women, resulting in conflict. Selection favored diverse tactics in both sexes capable of moving the fitness optima in their favor, ranging from altruism to violence. Our ancestors addressed some adaptive problems of human mating with cost-inflicting, even violent tactics. The adaptive problems include mate poachers, sexual infidelity, conflict over resource allocation, mate value discrepancies, relationship termination, and mate reacquisition. Violence directed toward mates is highly context dependent. Myriad situational factors affected the fitness costs and benefits of mating violence, selecting for context-sensitive psychologies and tactics in aggressors to manipulate victims and co-evolved victim defenses to avoid or minimize their victimization.
Women’s Avoidance of Sexual Assault
Authors: James Rachel M. , McDonald Melissa M. , Weekes-Shackelford Viviana 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Men’s sexual aggression against women has been a recurrent feature of human evolutionary history. Most of the research in this area has focused on why men are perpetrators of sexual assault, and why women are victims of sexual assault. However, given the reproductive costs of sexual victimization for women, it is important to also examine whether women are equipped with a psychological architecture that operates to avoid or thwart sexual assault. In this chapter, we discuss women’s psychology of rape avoidance using the framework of an evolved threat management system. The system is proposed to include an emotional calibration system that operates in response to variables that increase the risk or costs of sexual victimization. Women who are disproportionately at risk of becoming the victim of sexual assault, or for whom such threats would be particularly costly, are expected to experience a calibrated fear response. It is this fear that motivates adaptive behavioral adjustment to avoid or thwart sexual assault. This includes manifest behaviors deployed to defend against sexual aggression, including not walking alone at night and being more attuned to one’s surroundings. We review the extant research on the association between factors that increase the risk and costs of sexual victimization and the emotional and behavioral output that fosters avoidance of sexual threats.
Religious Populism in the Digital Age
Authors: Nascimento Cunha Magali do 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to understanding how expressions of religious populism occur in digital media, a phenomenon that marks the political dynamics in the contemporary world. The chapter presents key concepts about populism and religious populism and a systematization of studies on expressions of religious populism in the digital age. The chapter considers the presence of religious populism in different regions of the world, political systems, and expressions of faith. The ongoing studies make it possible to identify that the digital media environment potentiates populist expressions through the consecration of charismatic leadership, the establishment of a community of supporters, and the construction of the image of the leader as a missionary and savior.
Initiation (Abhiṣeka) in Indian Buddhism
Authors: Davidson Ronald M. 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
Initiation (abhiṣeka) in Indian Buddhism had a long trajectory, beginning as lustration offerings to the bodhi tree and concluding with the sexual practices of tantric Buddhism. Between these two, abhiṣeka rites were developed that first reflected one of the primary values—purification, especially purification for those associated with the maṇḍala worship practices of fifth-century Indian Buddhism. By the seventh century, the purificatory practices were modified and patterned after the coronation rituals association with Indian kingship, now employed as a gateway ritual in which the candidate would be allowed entrance into the maṇḍala and sworn to secrecy. As such, they also reflected the other primary value: vivification or infusion with vitality, as the vivification of a king who is both human and divine. Concomitant with entrance into the maṇḍala was commitment to vows of behavior and permission to recite mantras of specific Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Finally, in the eighth century, Buddhist tantrism was again modified to accept sexual practice, with the creation of “higher” initiations in the Yoga- and Yoginītantras.
Śaiva Tantra
Authors: Goodall Dominic 
Published: January 2023

Abstract
This chapter focuses on “tantrism” in the first millennium of the common era, the formative period, in which the school of doctrine and liturgy known as the Śaivasiddhānta emerged. One of the earliest surviving scriptures that can be regarded as a Śaiva tantra is the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. The Niśvāsa uses the term Mantramārga, “the path of mantras,” which various authors hold to be a possible candidate for an emic equivalent of the term tantrism. Two types of tantric mantras: bījamantra and mālāmantra are distinguished. The central religious fact that characterizes all Mantramārga traditions is dīkṣā, an initiation rite that deploys such mantras to bring about the goals of religious aspirants. The chapter identifies four categories of initiate, the lowest being the preliminary initiated neophyte (samayin) bound to the rules (samaya) of the religion; the highest being the guru (ācārya), whose principal disciples were the fully initiated putrakas. The remaining category was that of the sādhaka, the power-seeker, simultaneously a central figure and yet necessarily an “outsider,” who became increasingly marginalized as the religion widened socially. The chapter also touches upon other clues for the reconstruction of socioreligious history, such as the topic of special observances (caryā); the emergence of the genre of ritual manuals; and the shifting soteriological role of devotion (bhakti).