Origins of Human Innovation and Creativity

Innovation and creativity are two of the key characteristics that distinguish cultural transmission from biological transmission. This book explores a number of questions concerning the nature and timing of the origins of human creativity. What were the driving factors in the development of new technologies? What caused the stasis in stone tool technological innovation in the Early Pleistocene? Were there specific regions and episodes of enhanced technological development, or did it occur at a steady pace where ancestral humans lived? The authors are archaeologists who address these questions, armed with data from ancient artefacts such as shell beads used as jewelry, primitive musical instruments, and sophisticated techniques required to fashion certain kinds of stone into tools.

Providing ‘state of art’ discussions that step back from the usual archaeological publications that focus mainly on individual site discoveries, this book presents the full picture on how and why creativity in Middle to Late Pleistocene archeology/anthropology evolved.

• Gives a full, original and multidisciplinary perspective on how and why creativity evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene
• Enhances our understanding of the big leaps forward in creativity at certain times
• Assesses the intellectual creativity of Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens via their artefacts

Prof. Scott A. Elias is a retired Professor of Quaternary Science at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2000 to 2017. Before this, he was a Fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado from 1983 to 2000, where he earned his PhD in Environmental Biology. Elias has authored 226 publications. Since 2006, he has been Editor-in-Chief of three Elsevier encyclopaedias and co-editor-in-chief of four encyclopaedias and one comprehensive reference work. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Elsevier Reference Collection in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences.