The Significance For Understanding Human Cognition

The Sulawesi finding is not just an archaeological curiosity about an obscure plant.

It has implications for how we understand the cognitive and behavioral repertoire of anatomically modern humans during a period — the Late Pleistocene — that is crucial for understanding who we are.

The period between roughly 40,000 and 12,000 years ago saw the dispersal of modern humans across most of the world, the development of the earliest representational art (in places including Sulawesi itself), the extinction of the Neanderthals and other archaic human groups, and the beginning of the behavioral patterns that would eventually lead to agriculture, cities, writing, and all the rest.

Understanding what these ancient humans were doing — not just where they were and what tools they were making, but how they were organized socially, what they were thinking about, what they were consuming — is one of the central projects of modern archaeology and paleoanthropology.