Conceptual diversity and the evolution of abstract thought

forthcoming

Human cultural evolution Human cultural evolution is often traced via ancient pot-shards, cave paintings and ritualistic traditions. But a greater challenge is to unravel the abstract concepts behind these physical traces. Cultural evolution involves not just artefacts and practices, but also the transmission of conceptual structures – ways of mentally representing the world – with continuous intergenerational transmission over thousands of years. Cultural areas in distinct parts of the world have developed some strikingly different conceptual structures, but there are not yet established methods for systematically investigating this conceptual diversity. CONCEVO aims to uncover histories of conceptual dissemination in cultural areas, from the most basic types of concepts such as HAND or DOG, to higher-order, culturally significant concepts such as SPIRIT ANCESTOR or EXCHANGE PARTNER. I will develop a new methodology that combines the featural analysis of lexical semantics with the spatial and phylogenetic analyses of evolutionary linguisitcs. This approach builds on existing lexical-conceptual databases, while also developing a completely new type of data for comparative research on culturally significant concepts. These datasets will enable our team to identify areas in which cultural transmission has occurred between multiple language groups over thousands of years, and infer the origins and dissemination pathways of the most regionally significant concepts. These higher-order concepts are crucial to humans’ ability to live in social groups, and are therefore one of our most important evolutionary developments. CONCEVO will be built around case studies of two focal regions, Australia and Papua, both of which underwent thousands of years of relatively separate cultural development before the colonial era. However it aims at a wider impact: to establish a new research paradigm that will be globally applicable for discovering deep histories of conceptual evolution.