The worlds of archaeology and neuroscience have joined forces for the very first time to probe the origins of human thought in a conference at Cambridge University.

Scholars from all over the world converged on the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research last week for an event examining how physical evidence left behind by early humans can tell us about how they developed the ability to reason, remember, imagine and learn.

Neuroscientists and archaeologists who attended the event are already embarking on new collaborative projects that will use some of the latest technology to reassess some of the very first tools humans ever made. The aim is to better comprehend the process of ‘cognitive evolution'.

“Recent developments in neuroscientific scholarship potentially open up new avenues to archaeologists trying to understand how the thinking abilities of early humans evolved,” Dr Lambros Malafouris, who co-organised the event, said.

“Using their methods in conjunction with the earliest tools could help us to answer some of the most important questions about the long-term development of human cognition. Hopefully the combined expertise we assembled for this event will now help us to push these areas of study further forward.”

In particular, new techniques have recently emerged that combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with experimental psychology. fMRI is used to view the structure of the brain and show the relationship between physical changes (such as blood flow) and mental functioning (such as performing cognitive tasks).

Archaeologists hope to combine research into this human cognitive “architecture” with physical evidence of changes in human material culture, to create a picture of how humans' brains developed over time. The presentations at last week's conference covered topics ranging from this, to the evolutionary significance of stone tool making, to the way in which types of tangible activity in the brain have been proven to correlate with particular types of experience.

The conference was organised by Professor Colin Renfrew and Professor Chris Frith, as well as Dr Malafouris. A symposium volume is expected to be published at the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008.

It was funded by the British Academy and the Guarantors of Brain. More information about the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research can be found by following the links to the right of this page.

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