Lessons from tasmania – Cultural performance versus cultural capacity

Abstract

Characterized as ‘primitive’ and compared with chimpanzee and Middle Paleolithic capabilities, the Tasmanian culture has been subject to an intensif debate lasting for more than 40 years. This paper gives a reconsideration of the set of material cultural performances in the Tasmanian ethnographic record and applies the EECC model of the evolution and expansion of cultural capacities to it. Based on the analyses of problem-solution-distances in tool behavior, modular, composite, complementary, and notional cultural capacities are identified. The Tasmanian cultural record is a perfect example that apparently simple performances cannot be easily equated with archaic or non-modern behavior. Instead, the performances have to be seen as products of interdependent developments in biological, historical-social, and individual dimensions embedded in the group specific environment.