Question

Archaeologist Colin Renfrew formulated the 'sapient paradox' to highlight a perplexing temporal asymmetry: anatomically modern humans emerged approximately 200,000 years ago, yet widespread evidence of symbolic material culture—such as representational cave paintings, intentional burials with grave goods, and complex personal adornment—proliferates in the archaeological record only after roughly 45,000 years ago. While traditional evolutionary psychologists have invoked sudden, unobservable neurological mutations to bridge this lacuna, cognitive archaeologist Elena Ramos has recently proposed an epigenetic-material scaffolding model. Ramos posits that symbolic cognition did not spring fully formed from genetic reconfiguration, but rather crystallized through iterative, cumulative interactions with external symbolic artifacts that progressively rewired neural processing pathways over millennia. Although Ramos’s framework admittedly lacks definitive stratigraphical verification for its earliest hypothetical feedback stages—and at times leans heavily on speculative computational simulations of neural plasticity—her paradigm nonetheless provides a compelling conceptual bridge that demystifies the sudden flowering of human symbolic behavior without resorting to untestable genetic miracles.

Which of the following best characterizes the author’s attitude toward Elena Ramos’s proposed model?