14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Johannes Schick: „The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution“

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Dominik Schrey: title t.b.a.

More information coming soon.

Dr. Johannes Schick: „The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution“

This article develops a transindividual theory of multispecies technics. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of individuation, I extend his concept of the associated milieu beyond the relation between humans and technical objects to interspecies relations. I argue that the earliest technical gestures in hominin history may have emerged from the reciprocal relationship between human and non-human animals, and I introduce the notion of zoogestures to characterise this transindividual multispecies process. Three criteria operationalise the multispecies associated milieu: a living being must co-constitute the conditions of an operation involving another living being; the operation must depend on the presence or behaviour of that other living being; and the relation must open up or stabilise new possibilities for action. I test this heuristic against three cases of interspecies technical operations: social learning between domesticated horses (ponying) and within wild chimpanzee populations (Tinka); the invention of a new technical behaviour by a domesticated cow (Veronika) in a human milieu; and the multispecies ecological co-construction of beaver-human cohabitation in prehistory. The conclusion develops Simondon’s notion of présence to argue that technical gestures emerge not as Leroi-Gourhan’s exudations or extensions of the (human) body, but as a multispecies event.