Archaeology can provide two bodies of information relevant to the understanding of the evolution of human cognition--the timing of developments, and the evolutionary context of these developments. The challenge is methodological. Archaeology must document attributes that have direct implications for underlying cognitive mechanisms. One example of such a cognitive archaeology is found in spatial cognition. Cognitive archaeology is the branch of archaeology that investigates the development of human cognition. It therefore deals with a great variety of evidence, ranging from early rock art to other forms of palaeoart, from animal cognition to palaeoanthropology to psychology and ontogenic cognitive development, and it also needs to concern itself with evidence of early human technology and the ability of domesticating natural systems of energy.

Cognition is not a capacity limited to humans, or to primates generally. Some levels of cognition can be detected widely in the animal kingdom. The human lineage seems to have split from the other primates around six million years ago. It gave rise to the family of australopithecines that roamed Africa for several million years. Finally, we can detect archaeological evidence that humans towards the end of the Ice Ages were physically, mentally and probably cognitively indistinguishable from ourselves. So human cognitive evolution occurred essentially during the intervening time span. Cognitive archaeology rejects the idea that palaeanthropology, the study of the skeletal remains of hominids, is central to the study of human origins. The bones of our earliest ancestors may tell us much about the physical evolution of humans.