Anton Killin
Biographic Data
| ID | 1045115 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anton Killin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anton |
| FAMILY NAME | Killin |
| SIGNATURE | KILLIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3562-1731 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Beyond reasonable doubt: Reconsidering Neanderthal aesthetic capacity
An aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evo…
Philosophy and prehistory: New perspectives on minds, art, and culture
This article introduces the special issue “Philosophy and Prehistory: New Perspectives on Minds, Art, and Culture.” The primary motivation for the issue was to create a space where philosophy and evolutionary cognitive archaeology could intersect. We wanted to encourage cognitive archaeologists to reflect on their field from a philosophical perspective, and philosophers to consider key methodological, theoretical, or conceptual issues in evolutio…
Environmental justice through epistemic diversification: A critical reflection on One Health for just environmental public health
Four heuristics for theory selection in evolutionary cognitive archaeology
Understanding the minds of past populations through their material remains presents cognitive archaeologists with a range of inferential challenges. One of these is theory selection: which cognitive models should we choose for archaeological analysis, and why? In this article, we outline three problems facing researchers performing this task, and recommend four heuristics designed to mitigate the extent of those problems: consilience, theoretical…
Culture, Cooperation, and Communication: The Co-evolution of Hominin Cognition, Sociality, and Musicality
Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifa…
Past materials, past minds: The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology
The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology involves three related tasks: (1) asking what inferences might be drawn from the paleontological and archaeological records to past cognition, behavior and culture; (2) constructing synthetic accounts of the evolution of distinctive hominin capacities; (3) exploring how results from cognitive paleoanthropology might inform philosophy. We introduce some distinctive cognitive paleoanthropological infere…
The Deep History of Musicality: Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology of Music
Absent from the behavioral repertoire of other great apes, music is a distinctive feature of human social life in all known cultures, and a valued feature—one that plays many roles in human life, as attested by the anthropological record. Music accompanies ritual and praise, is a pedagogical tool, endows events additional layers of cultural meaning, and provides entertainment and emotional and social experiences, to name but a few. Music is ancie…
How Weird is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity
In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either th…
Culture, genes, selection, and learning: A response to Nichols, Mackey & Moll
In “How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals”, Nichols, Mackey, and Moll (henceforth NMM) deliver a thoughtful and detailed assessment of three recent publications on human cult
The Polysemy Theory of Sound
Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy
This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Sho
Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy
Chield: The causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database
Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to desi…
From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology
Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evoluti…
Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind
Barbara Gail Montero’s Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind is an important contribution to the philosophy of expertise and a rewarding read. The main purpose of the book is to undermine three commonplace assumptions about a subclass of skilled individuals that Montero refers to as ‘experts’. These assumptions are (i) that, when performing well, expert performers across a wide array of domains (from professional arts performers to …
How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism
This volume contains thirteen new chapters by leading philosophers and a primarily methodological introductory piece by the editor. Smith distinguishes biophilosophy from mainstream philosophy of biology, following a distinction made by Peter Godfrey-Smith in 2009’s Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. Godfrey-Smith distinguishes the philosophy of science from the philosophy of nature; the former research program involves philosophizing a…
From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology
Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evoluti…
Past materials, past minds: The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology
The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology involves three related tasks: (1) asking what inferences might be drawn from the paleontological and archaeological records to past cognition, behavior and culture; (2) constructing synthetic accounts of the evolution of distinctive hominin capacities; (3) exploring how results from cognitive paleoanthropology might inform philosophy. We introduce some distinctive cognitive paleoanthropological infere…
Culture, Cooperation, and Communication: The Co-evolution of Hominin Cognition, Sociality, and Musicality
Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifa…
Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind
Barbara Gail Montero’s Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind is an important contribution to the philosophy of expertise and a rewarding read. The main purpose of the book is to undermine three commonplace assumptions about a subclass of skilled individuals that Montero refers to as ‘experts’. These assumptions are (i) that, when performing well, expert performers across a wide array of domains (from professional arts performers to …
How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism
This volume contains thirteen new chapters by leading philosophers and a primarily methodological introductory piece by the editor. Smith distinguishes biophilosophy from mainstream philosophy of biology, following a distinction made by Peter Godfrey-Smith in 2009’s Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. Godfrey-Smith distinguishes the philosophy of science from the philosophy of nature; the former research program involves philosophizing a…
From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology
Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evoluti…
Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind
Barbara Gail Montero’s Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind is an important contribution to the philosophy of expertise and a rewarding read. The main purpose of the book is to undermine three commonplace assumptions about a subclass of skilled individuals that Montero refers to as ‘experts’. These assumptions are (i) that, when performing well, expert performers across a wide array of domains (from professional arts performers to …
Chield: The causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database
Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to desi…
Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy
This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Sho
Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy
Culture, genes, selection, and learning: A response to Nichols, Mackey & Moll
In “How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals”, Nichols, Mackey, and Moll (henceforth NMM) deliver a thoughtful and detailed assessment of three recent publications on human cult
The Polysemy Theory of Sound
The Deep History of Musicality: Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology of Music
Absent from the behavioral repertoire of other great apes, music is a distinctive feature of human social life in all known cultures, and a valued feature—one that plays many roles in human life, as attested by the anthropological record. Music accompanies ritual and praise, is a pedagogical tool, endows events additional layers of cultural meaning, and provides entertainment and emotional and social experiences, to name but a few. Music is ancie…
How Weird is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity
In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either th…
Culture, Cooperation, and Communication: The Co-evolution of Hominin Cognition, Sociality, and Musicality
Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifa…
Past materials, past minds: The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology
The philosophy of cognitive paleoanthropology involves three related tasks: (1) asking what inferences might be drawn from the paleontological and archaeological records to past cognition, behavior and culture; (2) constructing synthetic accounts of the evolution of distinctive hominin capacities; (3) exploring how results from cognitive paleoanthropology might inform philosophy. We introduce some distinctive cognitive paleoanthropological infere…
Beyond reasonable doubt: Reconsidering Neanderthal aesthetic capacity
An aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evo…
Philosophy and prehistory: New perspectives on minds, art, and culture
This article introduces the special issue “Philosophy and Prehistory: New Perspectives on Minds, Art, and Culture.” The primary motivation for the issue was to create a space where philosophy and evolutionary cognitive archaeology could intersect. We wanted to encourage cognitive archaeologists to reflect on their field from a philosophical perspective, and philosophers to consider key methodological, theoretical, or conceptual issues in evolutio…
Environmental justice through epistemic diversification: A critical reflection on One Health for just environmental public health
Four heuristics for theory selection in evolutionary cognitive archaeology
Understanding the minds of past populations through their material remains presents cognitive archaeologists with a range of inferential challenges. One of these is theory selection: which cognitive models should we choose for archaeological analysis, and why? In this article, we outline three problems facing researchers performing this task, and recommend four heuristics designed to mitigate the extent of those problems: consilience, theoretical…
Epistemology (8 works) · Language and cultural evolution (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Cognitive science (7 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · Cognition (5 works) · History (5 works)