Domestic spaces as crucibles of Paleolithic culture: An archaeological perspective

Many animals modify their environment to make safe places for sleeping or rearing their young, such as digging a burrow or building a nest. Examples among mammals include farrowing by wild female pigs and nest building by voles, packrats, and bears (Vaughan, 1990; Mayer et al., 2002; Miller et al., 2017; Zhong et al., 2022). Corresponding structures built by humans have a much broader range of uses that may include child rearing, food preparation and sharing, storage, tool manufacture, and maintaining social bonds through conversation and physical contact. Human habitations—specifically domestic spaces—also function as a theater for the performance, reenactment, transmission, and acquisition of cultural knowledge and skills (Kent, 1984; Gamble, 1999; Clark and Ranlett, 2022).

As nodes of information sharing, domestic spaces increasingly became places where culture could be perpetuated (Kuhn et al., 2018; Kuhn and Stiner, 2019). Without these spaces, the propagative engine of cumulative culture would have remained very weak in human evolution. A niche-constructing dynamic (Laland et al., 2000; Odling-Smee et al., 2003) exerted reciprocal influences between human ancestors and domestic spaces (Dunbar, 2003; Maher and Conkey, 2019). Whereas many readers may agree with all or parts of this claim in principle, making the case with scientific evidence requires that we deal effectively with the fuzziness of Paleolithic records (Stiner, 2021).

The social interactions and knowledge transmission that underlie cumulative culture are contingent on the proximity among individuals. Domestic places thus emerged as common arenas of opportunity. Here we explore evidence about the evolution of human culture in the context of domestic spaces. We begin with a closer look at the core functional properties of domestic spaces as they pertain to earlier human lifeways, and then examine the archaeological evidence for trends. These trends include the repeated visitation of certain locations, the use of fire, and the decoration, structural elaboration, and organization of living spaces. This evidence seldom comes in neat, clearly interpretable packages. Rather, we must find ways to make greater sense of palimpsest phenomena as well as the rare ‘smoking guns’ in the archaeological record. Archaeologists can learn a lot from artifact assemblages even if they have become somewhat jumbled or temporally compressed. Because domestic spaces are subject to destructive postdepositional processes and not easily interpreted, we require robust methodologies to extract meaningful information about what transpired in these locations (Clark and Gingerich, 2022).

In this review, we summarize evidence for the transformation of these spaces from >3 ma to ∼30 ka in western Eurasia and Africa. Patterns detected within these time-averaged records are cumulative and thus reflect habitual actions that traverse time, improving our understanding of the function of domestic spaces and evolution of human behaviors in relationship to those spaces in the past. We begin by exploring the concept of domestic space and its role in the development of cumulative culture. Next, we review some important changes seen in the archaeological record across five roughly defined intervals. Finally, we highlight methods to extract additional information by dissecting palimpsest records, information that cannot be had from single-component records.

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