Agents and their artefacts: a natural history of ex-bodiment

The evolution of cognition is often presented as a series of anatomical and inferential adaptations within a lineage: vision, motor control etc. Here I shall review how the environment can be used to outsource mental representations and used to simplify problems of inference. This "exbodied cognition" is widespread in nature, but reaches an extreme form in our own species, without which we would have evolved no material culture. To speak of human cognition without written symbols, and increasingly, mechanical mental buttresses such a calculating devices, is to ignore the most prominent feature of H. Sapiens' evolutionary and cultural history.