A scientific paradigmatic account suffices to interpret behavioral evolution in early Homo. Cognitive surprises, favoring anomalous behavioral propensities to sporadic expression, can explain “snakes-and-ladders” appearances and disappearances of Paleolithic skills in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record. The account applies the principle of stationary action, which underpins the free energy principle, to self-organizing systems at an evolutionary timescale. Unusual personal attainments, often explained by invoking progressive ascent of evolutionary phylogenetic “ladders” of cognitive and technical abilities, could be disregarded in a hominin community that failed to imagine or articulate possible advantages for its survivability. Such failure, as well as diverse fortuitous demographic accidents, could erase from collective memory the recollection of exceptional individual conduct which disappeared down a “snake”, so to speak, of the human evolutionary “puzzle”. The puzzle discomforts paleoanthropologists. Some explain it away with the self-justifying assertion that separate paleospecies of Homo differentially possessed cognitive abilities that allegedly underlay the differential presence or absence in the Pleistocene archeological record of traces of particular behavioral outcomes or skills. An alternative methodological perspective, grounded in the fundamental relationships between organisms and their environments, affords a parsimonious, prosaic, deflationary account for appearances and disappearances of behavioral outcomes and skills.
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