Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture, as a faculty, has played for human evolution, but they underrate or even disregard the role of distinct cultural traditions and the ensuing diversity, both in present-day humans and as a dimension of past cognition. We argue that culture has exerted a profound impact on human cognition from the start in a dual manner: It scaffolds cognition through both development and evolution, and it thereby continually diversifies the form and content of human thinking. To unveil early sapiens cognition and retrace its evolutionary trajectories, this cognitive diversity must be considered. We present two strategies to achieve this: large-scale extrapolation and phylogenetic comparison. The former aims at filtering out diversity to determine what is basic and universal versus culturally shaped (illustrated for theory of mind abilities). The latter capitalizes on the diversity to reconstruct evolutionary trajectories (illustrated for religious beliefs). The two methods, in combination, advance our understanding of the cognitive abilities of our early sapiens ancestors and of how these abilities emerged and evolved. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this approach for our insights into early cognition itself and its scientific investigation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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文化在重建早期智人认知中的双重作用。


关于早期智人认知，即我们祖先的认知能力的问题很有趣，但众所周知很难解决。这些能力不会在考古记录中留下任何痕迹，需要从间接证据中推断出来，并根据我们对当今认知的理解来推断。大多数此类尝试都承认文化作为一种​​能力在人类进化中所发挥的作用，但它们低估甚至忽视了独特文化传统的作用以及随之而来的多样性，无论是在当今人类中还是作为过去认知的一个维度。我们认为，文化从一开始就以双重方式对人类认知产生了深远的影响：它通过发展和进化支撑认知，从而不断使人类思维的形式和内容多样化。为了揭示早期智人的认知并追溯其进化轨迹，必须考虑这种认知多样性。我们提出了两种策略来实现这一目标：大规模外推和系统发育比较。前者旨在过滤掉多样性，以确定什么是基本的、普遍的，什么是文化塑造的（以心智能力理论为例）。后者利用多样性来重建进化轨迹（以宗教信仰为例）。这两种方法结合起来，促进了我们对早期智人祖先的认知能力以及这些能力是如何出现和进化的理解。最后，我们讨论了这种方法对我们深入了解早期认知本身及其科学研究的影响。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。