Although the hunter-gatherers make up only a small part of this 15-20 billion year long story it is a critical piece for being able to see the light at the end of the tunner.

In Chapter One of VOLUME I I present some key ideas relative to the hunter-gatherer story. Here I would like to provide a more expanded version of that story from a seminal book that suggests how human development may have occurred.

Anthropologist Steven Mithen in his book, THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science [1], provides some seminal ideas on the evolution of the human mind that considers issues vital to understanding the development of language. In his carefully thought through presentation he provides a good history for the development of our species from the point where our branch divided from the other apes up to the cultural explosion that announced Modern Humans.

This material is presented to provide a firm background for the development of the hunter-gatherer way of life that continues to guide us with its genetic imprinting.

Mithen gives the details of our current understanding and lays a foundation on which future findings and knowledge can be built and understood. Athough he may have made some serious mistakes in the way he ties together what is known today, his efforts are well worth serious study and thought.

SO LET THE STORY BEGIN:

(p. 7)[1] "It took millions of years for the human mind to evolve. It is the product of a long, gradual process with no predestined goal or direction. During the final 2.5 million years of this process, our ancestors left traces of their behavior such as their stone tools, food debris and paintings on cave walls. They only left written records towards the very end of this period, starting a mere 5,000 years ago. Consequently to understand the evolution of the mind we must look at our prehistory, for it was during that time that the distinguishing features of the human mind arose, features such as language and an advanced intelligence. To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human. I hope, therefore, that THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND will be of interest not just to archaeologists and psychologists, but to any moderately inquisitive and reflective reader."

"I have tried to write a book that makes the evidence from prehistory accessible to readers who may never previously have heard of an australopithecine or a handaxe. But this book also tries to put forward a new theory for the evolution of the mind."

"Although the evolution of the mind was a slow, gradual process, there were nevertheless key events which acted as turning points for how the mind evolved.... [After reading] THE MODULARITY OF MIND by Jerry Fodor.... an idea about the prehistory of the mind was sown within my mind...."

(p. 9) "The human mind is intangible, an abstraction. In spite of more than a century of systematic study by psychologists and philosophers, it eludes definition and adequate description, let alone explanation. Stone tools, pieces of broken bone and carved figurines -- the stuff of archaeology -- have other qualities. They can be weighed and measured, illustrated in books and put on display. They are nothing at all like the mind -- except for the profound sense of mystery that surrounds them. So why ask an archaeologist about the human mind?"

"People are intrigued by various aspects of the mind. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? How can the human mind create art, undertake science and believe in religious ideologies when not a trace of these are found in the chimpanzee, our closest living relative?"

(p. 10) "...[A]lmost all disciplines can contribute towards an understanding of the human mind."

"But what has archaeology got to offer? More specifically, the archaeology to be considered in this book, that of prehistoric hunter-gatherers? This stretches from the first appearance of stone tools 2.5 million years ago to the appearance of agriculture after 10,000 years ago. The answer is quite simple: we can only ever understand the present by knowing the past. Archaeology may therefore not only be able to contribute, it may hold the key to an understanding of the modern mind."

"Creationists believe that the mind sprang suddenly into existence fully formed. In their views it is a product of divine creation. They are wrong: the mind has a long evolutionary history and can be explained without recourse to supernatural powers. The importance of understanding the evolutionary history of the mind is one reason why many psychologists study the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. Numerous studies have compared the chimpanzee and human mind, notably with regard to linguistic capacities. Yet such studies have ultimately proved unsatisfactory, because while the chimpanzee is indeed our closest living relative, it is not very close at all. We shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. After that date the evolutionary lineages leading to modern apes and humans diverged. A full 6 million years of evolution therefore separates the minds of modern humans and chimpanzees."

"It is that period of 6 million years which holds the key to an understanding of the modern mind. We need to look at the minds of our many ancestors during that time, including the 4.5-million-year-old ancestor known as Australopithecus ramidus; the 2-million-year-old Homo habilis, among the first of our ancestors to make stone tools; Homo erectus, the first to leave Africa 1.8 million years ago; Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), who survived in Europe until less than 30,000 years ago; and finally our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, appearing 100,000 years ago. Such ancestors are known only through their fossil remains and the material residues of their behavior -- those stone tools, broken bones and carved figurines."

"The most ambitious attempt so far to reconstruct the minds of these ancestors has been by the psychologist Merlin Donald. In his book THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND (1991), he drew substantially on archaeological data to propose a scenario for the evolution of the mind. I want to follow in Donald's footsteps, although I believe he made some fundamental errors in his work -- otherwise there would be no need for this book. But I want to turn the tables on Donald's approach. Rather than being a psychologist drawing on archaeological data, I am writing as an archaeologist who wishes to draw on ideas from psychology."

(p. 11) "The last two decades have seen a remarkable advance in our understanding of the behavior and evolutionary relationships of our ancestors. Indeed many archaeologists now feel confident that the time is ripe to move beyond asking questions about how these ancestors looked and behaved, to asking what was going on within their minds. It is time for a 'cognitive archaeology.'"

"The need for this is particularly evident from the pattern of brain expansion during the course of human evolution and its relationship - or the lack of one -- to changes in past behavior. It becomes clear that there is no simple relationship between brain size, 'intelligence,' and behavior.... [T]here were two major spurts of brain enlargement, one between 2.0 and 1.5 million years ago, which seems to be related to the appearance of Homo habilis, and a less pronounced one between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists tentatively link the first spurt to the development of tool making, but can find no major change in the nature of the archaeological record correlating with the second period of rapid brain expansion. Our ancestors continued the same basic hunting and gathering lifestyle, with the same limited range of stone and wooden tools."

"The two really dramatic transformations in human behavior occurred long after the modern size of the brain had evolved. They are both associated exclusively with Homo sapiens sapiens. The first was a cultural explosion between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago, when the first art, complex technology and religion appeared. The second was the rise of farming 10,000 years ago, when people for the first time began to plant crops and domesticate animals. Although the Neanderthals (200,000 - 30,000 years ago) had brains as large as ours today, their culture remained extremely limited -- no art, no complex technology and most probably no religious behavior. Now big brains are expensive organs, requiring a lot of energy to maintain -- 22 times as much as an equivalent amount of muscles requires when at rest. So here we find a dilemma -- what was all the new brain processing power before the 'cultural explosion' being used for? What was happening to the mind as brain size expanded in the two major spurts during human evolution? And what happened to it between these spurts, and to the mind of Homo sapiens sapiens to cause the cultural explosion of 60,000 - 30,000 years ago? When did language and consciousness first arise? When did a modern form of intelligence arise -- what indeed is this intelligence and the nature of the intelligence that preceded it? What are the relationships of these, if any, to the size of the brain?"

(p. 13) "We will only be able to make sense of the evidence, however, if we have some expectations about the types of minds that our ancestors may have possessed. Otherwise we will simply be faced with a bewildering mass of data, not knowing which aspects of it may be significant for our study.... I am able to ... [set up such expectations] because psychologists have realized that we can understand the modern mind only by understanding the process of evolution. Consequently while archaeologists have been developing a 'cognitive archaeology,' psychologists have been developing an 'evolutionary psychology.' These two new sub-disciplines are in great need of each other.... It is my task within this book to perform a union, the offspring of which will be a more profound understanding of the mind than either archaeology or psychology alone can achieve."

"One of the fundamental arguments of the new evolutionary psychology is that it is wrong to view the mind as a general-purpose learning mechanism, like some sort of powerful computer. This idea is dominant within the social sciences, and is indeed a 'common-sense' view of the mind. The evolutionary psychologists argue that we should replace it with a view of the mind as a series of specialized 'modules,' or 'cognitive domains' or intelligences,' each of which is dedicated to some specific type of behavior -- such as modules for acquiring language, or tool-using abilities, or engaging in social interaction. As I will explain in the following chapters, this new view of the mind does indeed hold a key to unlocking the nature of both the prehistoric and modern mind -- although in a very different way from that in which the evolutionary psychologists currently believe. The contrast between a 'generalized' and 'specialized' mentality will emerge as a critical theme throughout this book."

(p. 14) "As we look at the new ideas of evolutionary psychology, we will find another dilemma that requires resolution. If the mind is indeed constituted by numerous specialized processes each dedicated to a specific type of behavior, how can we possibly account for one of the most remarkable features of the modern mind: a capacity for an almost unlimited imagination? How can this arise from a series of isolated cognitive processes each dedicated to a specific type of behavior? The answer to this dilemma can only be found by exposing the prehistory of the mind."

(p. 16) "In this book I intend to specify the 'whats,' 'whens,' and whys' for the evolution of the mind. While following its course I will be searching for -- and will find -- the cognitive foundations of art, religion, and science. By exposing these foundations it will become clear how we share common roots with other species -- even though the mind of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, is indeed so fundamentally different from our own. I will thus provide the hard evidence to reject the creationist claims that the mind is a product of supernatural intervention. At the end of this prehistory I hope I will have furthered an understanding of how the mind works. And I also hope to have demonstrated why one should ask an archaeologist about the human mind."

(p. 17) "To find the origins of the modern mind we must look into the darkness of prehistory. We must go back to a time before the first civilizations, which began a mere 5,000 years ago. We must go back further than the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago. We must flash past the first appearance of art 30,000 years ago and even that of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, in the fossil record 100,000 years ago. Not even 2.5 million years ago, the time when the very first stone tools appear, is adequate. Our starting point for the prehistory of the mind can be no less than 6 million years ago. For at that time there lived an ape whose descendants evolved in two separate directions. One path led to the modern apes, the chimpanzees, and gorillas; and the other to modern humans. And consequently, this ancient ape is referred to as the common ancestor."

"Not only the common ancestor but also the missing link. It is this species that links us to the living apes, and it remains missing from the fossil record. We have not a single fossil fragment. But we cannot doubt that the 'missing link' existed. Scientists are hard on its heels. By measuring the differences in the genetic makeup of modern apes and humans, and by estimating the rate at which genetic mutations arise, they have tracked it down to living about 6 million years ago. And we can be confident that it lived in Africa, for -- just as Darwin declared -- Africa does indeed seem to have been the cradle of humankind. No other continent has yielded the requisite ancestral human fossils."

(p. 36) "My own interest in the origins of the human mind was first sparked... by a remarkable paper I read as an undergraduate. In 1979 an American archaeologist by the name of Thomas Wynn had published an article which claimed that by 300,000 years ago the modern mind was already in place.... The evidence that Thomas Wynn used for his claim were the fine symmetrical handaxes made by Homo erectus and archaic Homo sapiens...."

"How did he reach this conclusion? He began by using an idea that has been hotly debated by academics for many years: that the phases of mental development in the child reflect the phases of cognitive evolution of our human ancestors. In jargon, this is referred to as the idea that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.' This is a 'big idea,' .... Think of it as implying that the mind of, say, Homo erectus or perhaps a chimpanzee today may have structural similarities to that of a young child, although obviously they will possess a vastly different content. To use this idea, Tom Wynn needed to know what the minds of young children were like; he needed to know the phases of mental development. Not surprisingly he looked to the work of the child psychologist Jean Piaget, by far the most influential figure at that time."

RESPONSE:

.

"In essence recapitulation proposes that the sequence of developmental stages that a juvenile of a species goes through, its ontogeny, reflects the sequence of adult forms of its ancestors, its phylogeny." [2]

It is my understanding that modern biologists (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, 1977, ONTOGENY AND PHYLOGENY) recognize that evolutionary change (mutations) don't occur such that they effect only the final stage of embryonic development. In other words every organ/system doesn't necessarily recapitulate every earlier evolutionary stage of that species, and then go on from there. Some organs in fact have their development stopped at a stage of recapitulation earlier than their parents displayed and thereby do not complete the ontogeny of the species, but remain at some earlier stage of that development.

From my perspective mutations all along the route to the development of the current adult form of the species would seem to be required. In fact these mutations that stop a particular organ, or system, from going through its full development should be more likely than ones that happen to produce change at the end of the organ/system's development since there are more places where these mutations can take place. And, in either case as we are well aware any mutation is more likely to be destructive than beneficial to the individual. But in those rare cases where the change is beneficial, rather than a recapitulation, there would actually be progress through regression in that organ/system.

So, in evolutionary changes some organs recapitulate phylogeny, some do not. But the critical point to recognize is that the development of every component of the embryo recapitulates the evolutionary history of the species up to the point where the mutation stops this recapitulation. For example think of an organism with a sequence of evolutionary change, A through L. A mutation occurs in an organ that stops its development at stage F. This organ than does not recapulate the stages G through L, but functions as it did at stage F. For example human beings have a striking resemblance to juvenile chimpanazees rather than having their body shape evolved out of and then going beyond the adult body shape of our predecessors.

.

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(p. 36) "Piaget was a psychologist who firmly believed that the mind is like a computer. According to his theories, the mind runs a small set of general-purpose programs which control the entry of new information into the mind, and which serve to restructure the mind so that it passes through a series of developmental phases. He called the last of these phases, reached when the child is about 12 years old, formal operational intelligence. In this phase the mind can think about hypothetical objects and events. This type of thinking is absolutely essential for the manufacture of a stone tool like a handaxe. One must form a mental image of what the finished tool is to look like before starting to remove flakes from the stone nodule. Each strike follows from a hypothesis as to its effect on the shape of the tool. As a consequence, Tom Wynn felt confident in attributing formal operational intelligence, and hence a fundamentally modern mind, to the makers of handaxes."

(p. 37) "But could the prehistory of the mind really have been over so soon in the course of human evolution? Did the appearance of art, bone tools and global colonization... require no new cognitive underpinnings? This seemed implausible to say the least."

"A scrutiny of Tom Wynn's work showed that he had been faultless in using Piaget's ideas. To make a handaxe which was simultaneously symmetrical in three dimensions certainly seemed to involve the types of mental processes that Piaget argued were characteristic of formal operational intelligence. So maybe it was Piaget's ideas that were wrong. This has indeed been the message from many psychologists during the last decade: the mind does not run general-purpose programs, nor is it like a sponge, indiscriminately soaking up whatever information is around. Psychologists have introduced a new type of analogy for the mind: it is like a Swiss army knife.... But if the mind is a Swiss army knife, how many devices are there. What problems are these designed to solve? How did they get there? And is this analogy any better at helping us understand imagination and creative thought?"

"Many psychologists since 1980 have addressed such questions. They have adopted terms such as 'modules,' 'cognitive domains,' and 'intelligences' to describe each of the specialized devices. There are lots of disagreements about the number and nature of the specialized devices, but by scrutinizing their work we will be more successful at exposing the architecture of the mind than when we idly ponder the mind as we play with children. And that architecture looks fundamentally different from the one suggested by Piaget. So now we must follow how this Swiss-army-knife view of the mind has arisen and how it has developed during the last few years."

"Our starting point is with two big books published in 1983. In fact the first of these books is a small slim volume, but it has some big ideas about the architecture of the mind, and gives some major clues to its past: THE MODULARITY OF MIND, by Jerry Fodor."

"Jerry Fodor is a psycho-linguist with very clear ideas about the architecture of the mind. He proposes that it should be split into two parts which he calls perception, or input systems, and cognition, or the central systems. (p. 38) Their respective architectures are very different; input systems are like the blades on a Swiss army knife and he describes these as a series of discrete and independent 'modules,' such as sight, hearing, and touch. He includes language as one of these input systems. In contrast the central systems have no architecture at all, or at least their architecture will always remain hidden from us. This is where those mysterious processes happen, known as 'thought,' 'problem solving,' and imagination.' It is where 'intelligence' resides."

"Fodor argues that each input system is based on independent brain processes. For instance, those we use for hearing are utterly different from those we use for sight, or for language: they are like different blades within the Swiss army knife that just happen to be contained within the same case. This modularity of input systems is attested by numerous lines of evidence which include their apparent association with specific parts of the brain, the characteristic patterns of development in the child, and their propensity to exhibit specific patterns of breakdown. Fodor also stresses how the input systems operate very quickly and are mandatory: one cannot help to hear, or to see, when given the appropriate stimuli."

"While few would contest these features of the input systems, further features proposed by Fodor are more open to controversy. First is the notion that input systems do not have direct access to the information being acquired by other input systems. Hence what I am seeing at this moment is not influenced by what I am hearing. Fodor uses the term 'encapsulated' to describe this feature of the input systems. A second feature is that the input systems have only limited information from the central systems. This, for Fodor, is a crucial architectural feature, for it means that the knowledge possessed by any individual has a limited, perhaps even marginal, influence on the way they perceive the world. A neat example he uses to illustrate this is optical illusions: these persist even when we know that what we are seeing is untrue."

"The idea that cognition only marginally influences perception runs counter to the relativist ideas of the social sciences. Recall that when we were thinking about the mind as a sponge, young children were supposed to soak up the knowledge of their culture. Well, to the majority of social scientists that knowledge also includes how to perceive the world. Fodor is saying that this is wrong: the nature of perception is already hard-wired into the mind at birth. Fodor hates relativism almost as much as he hates fiberglass powerboats, which I assume means he hates it quite a lot."

"According to Fodor, input systems are encapsulated, mandatory, fast operating, and hard wired. He calls them stupid. As such they contrast with cognition, the 'smart' central system. Fodor argues that we know almost nothing about how the central systems work, other than that they have a series of features which are opposite of the input systems: they operate slowly, are unencapsulated, and domain neutral; in other words, the processes of thought and problem solving turn on the integration of information from all input systems, in addition to that which is being internally generated. Unlike the input systems, the processes of the central systems cannot be related to specific parts of the brain."

(p. 39) "The fundamental character of cognition is that it is holistic, the exact opposite of the input systems which are all dedicated to dealing with one specific type of information alone. And this is what Fodor sees as the most puzzling feature of cognition: 'its non encapsulation, its creativity, its holism, and its passion for the analogical.' Fodor feels defeated by the central systems, declaring they are impossible to study. For him, 'thought,' 'problem solving,' 'imagination,' and 'intelligence' are unresolvable."

"According to Fodor 'it is, no doubt, important to attend to the eternally beautiful and true. But it is more important not to be eaten.' At other times, however, one survives by contemplating the nature of the world in a slow, reflective manner, integrating many different types and sources of information. Only by this can one come to recognize the regularities and structure of the world. 'Nature has contrived to have it both ways,' Fodor argues, 'to get the best out of fast dumb systems and slow contemplative ones, by simply refusing to choose between them.'"

"In the same year that Fodor's book was published, another one appeared: FRAMES OF MIND: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, by Howard Gardner. In some ways this contrasts dramatically with Fodor's work. Gardner is as much concerned with practical matters in terms of devising education policies for schools, as with purely philosophical issues concerning the mind. He also draws on information from more than just psychology and linguistics to bear on the mind, bringing in data from disciplines such as social anthropology and educational studies."

(p. 40) "Gardner proposes a very different type of architecture for the mind; he does away with the distinction between input and central systems and instead focuses on the notion of intelligence -- which to Fodor is unresolvable. He questions whether there is a single, generalized intellectual capacity -- the size of one's sponge, or speed of one's computer -- and replaces it with no less than seven different types of intelligence. He claims that these are based in different parts of the brain, having their own dedicated and independent neurological processes. So here too we have a Swiss-army-knife architecture for the mind, with each blade now described as an intelligence."

"To identify the multiple intelligences of the mind Gardner uses a stringent set of criteria. For instance, he feels that there should be evidence that the core capacity may become isolated by brain damage, either in terms of losing the capacity (while all others remain unimpaired), or losing all other capacities yet remaining competent in the proposed intelligence. He also feels that one should be able to see a distinct developmental history in the child for the intelligence, and that it ought to be developed to different degrees in different individuals. By using such criteria, Gardner arrives at his set of seven intelligences: his blades for the Swiss army knife of the modern mind."

"Gardner's seven intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic and two forms of personal intelligence, one for looking in at one's own mind, and one for looking outward toward others."

"...Gardner suggest that the architecture of the mind is constituted by a series of relatively autonomous intelligences. Not only does he suggest this, but the case is very powerfully made. In doing so, he seems to depart quite radically from the type of architecture proposed by Fodor. Gardner's intelligences are very different from Fodor's modules. The former have a developmental history -- their character is heavily influenced by the cultural context of the individual. The blades of Gardner's Swiss army knife are concerned with thinking and problem solving, not just with the acquisition of information as undertaken by a Fodorian module. There is one more fundamental difference. But, ironically, this bring the ideas of Fodor and Gardner much closer together than they initially appear."

(p. 41) "While Fodor's modules are absolutely independent from each other, Gardner continuously stresses how interaction between the multiple intelligences is fundamental to the workings of the mind.... And the wisest individuals, he suggests, are those who are most able at building connections across domains, as exemplified in the use of metaphors and analogies."

"The word 'analogy' immediately takes us back to think of how Fodor described the central systems: they have 'a passion for analogical thought.' Could it be that Fodor could see no modularity in the central systems simply because the intelligences or modules within it function so smoothly together that one is unaware that any modularity exists?"

"Let us pause for a moment in this spin through recent thought in psychology to assess how far we have come in exposing the architecture of the mind. Fodor has given us a two-tier architecture, and the role of each tier appears to be of evolutionary interest: one can imagine a mind working with just the input systems, but not with just a central system. Insects and amoebas need input systems, but they don't require the processes of the central systems. So perhaps the latter have been added on sometime during evolution. Gardner has given us a Swiss-army-knife model for the processes of thought which, if the multiple intelligences can truly function together sufficiently smoothly and seamlessly, appears not substantially different from the manner in which Fodor characterized the central systems. So, perhaps the mind is not just a single Swiss army knife, but in fact two knives: one for input systems in which the blades remain truly independent, and one for thought in which the blades are somehow working together for most of the time. But if that is true, why are there separate blades for thought in the first place? Why not have a general-purpose learning/thinking/problem-solving program? Or in other words, a general intelligence? And what confidence can we have that Gardner has identified the correct number and types of blades on the knife? Gardner himself admits that someone else looking at the mind might find a different range of intelligences. To answer these questions we had better think about who put this Swiss army knife/knives of the mind together -- that is, about the architect of the mind: the processes of evolution. To do this we must return to our study of recent thought in psychology and meet a gang of psychologists who have been shouting the loudest during the 1990s: the evolutionary psychologists."

(p. 42) "The leaders of the gang of evolutionary psychologists are Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.... During the late 1980s and early 1990s they published a succession of papers culminating in a long essay, entitled 'The psychological foundations of culture,' published in THE ADAPTED MIND, a 1992 book they edited with Jerome Barkow. By adopting an explicitly evolutionary approach their work has challenged many of the conventional notions about the mind -- the mind as a sponge, the mind as a general-purpose computer."

"The reason that they parade under the banner of evolutionary psychology is that the gang argue that we can only understand the nature of the modern mind by viewing it as a product of biological evolution. The starting point for this argument is that the mind is a complex, functional structure that could not have arisen by chance. If we are willing to ignore the possibility of divine intervention, the only known process by which such complexity can have arisen is evolution by natural selection. In this regard C&T [Cosmides and Tooby] treat the mind as one treats any other organ of the body -- it is an evolved mechanism which has been constructed and adjusted in response to the selective pressures faced by our species during its evolutionary history. More specifically they argue that the human mind evolved under the selective pressures faced by our human ancestors as they lived by hunting and gathering in Pleistocene environments...."

(p. 43) "As a consequence of this, C&T argue that the mind consists of a Swiss army knife with a great many, highly specialized blades; in other terms, it is composed of multiple mental modules. Each of these blades/modules has been designed by natural selection to cope with one specific adaptive problem faced by hunter-gatherers during our past. Just as Gardner argued, the mind has more than a capacity for 'general intelligence' -- there are multiple specialized types of intelligence, or ways to think. As with Gardner's intelligences, it is likely that each module has its own specific form of memory and reasoning processes. But the modules of C&T's mind are very different from the intelligences of Gardner. In fact they are far more like Fodor's input processes: they are hard-wired into the mind at birth and universal among all people. Whereas the character of Gardner's multiple intelligences were open to influence by the cultural context in which young minds developed, this is not the case with C& T's modules."

"These modules have a critically important feature that we have not come across yet: they are 'content rich.' In other words, the modules not only provide sets of rules for solving problems, but they provide much of the information that one needs to do so. This knowledge reflects the structure of the real world -- or at least that of the Pleistocene in which the mind evolved. This information about real-world structure, together with a multitude of rules for solving problems, each contained in its own mental module, is already in a child's mind at birth. Some modules are sparked into action immediately -- modules for eye contact with the mother -- others need a little time before they get busy, such as the modules for language acquisition."

(p. 45) "C&T... suggest that the mind is teeming with a multitude of modules. These include:

A face recognition module, a spatial relations module, a rigid objects mechanics module, a tool-use module, a fear module, a social-exchange module, an emotion-perception module, a kin oriented motivation module, an effort allocation and recalibration module, a child care module, a social inference module, a friendship module, a semantic-inference module, a grammar acquisition module, a communication-pragmatics module, a theory of mind module, and so on!"

This extensive and incomplete list of possible modules is perhaps not that different from what Gardner was suggesting. For from such lists one can readily group modules together, such as those about social interaction, or those about physical objects. C&T have called these groupings 'faculties.' As such, these faculties seem similar to Gardner's notion of an intelligence.... But so many modules? Can we really have so many independent psychological processes in our minds?"

(p. 49) "The overwhelming impression from the descriptions of modern hunter-gatherers is that all domains of their lives are so intimately connected that the notion that they think about these with separate reasoning devices seems implausible. Killing and eating animals appears to be as much about constructing and mediating social relationships as it is about getting food. Hunter-gatherers have to build huts within their settlements for shelter, but the act of placing a hut at some location rather than another makes an important social statement. Similarly everything that is worn on the body acts both to keep the person warm but also to send social messages about identity and how that person wants to be treated.... In a nutshell, any one action of a modern hunter-gatherer does not address one single adaptive problem. It simultaneously and intentionally impinges on a whole host of problems. If -- and it is a very big if -- these modern hunter-gatherers are indeed a good analogy for those of the Pleistocene, how could selective pressures have existed to produce a Swiss army knife for the mind?"

(p. 50) "So we are left with a paradox. The evolutionary psychologists make a very powerful argument that the mind should be like a Swiss army knife. It should be constituted by multiple, content-rich mental modules, each adapted to solve a specific problem faced by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. One cannot fault the logic of their argument. I find it compelling. But as soon as we think about Cambridge dons, Australian Aborigines, or young children this idea seems almost absurd. For me it is the human passion for analogy and metaphor which provides the greatest challenge to Cosmides and Tooby's view of the mind. Simply by being able to invoke the analogy that the mind is like a Swiss army knife, Leda Cosmides appears to be falsifying the claim that is being made."

How can we resolve this paradox? I think we should start by looking once again at children's minds, but this time with a little help from another group of experts: the developmental (rather than evolutionary) psychologists."

"Are children really born with content-rich mental modules that reflect the structure of the real (Pleistocene) world, as C&T would have us believe? The answer from developmental psychology is overwhelmingly in their favor. Young children seem to have intuitive knowledge about the world in at least four domains of behavior: about language, psychology, physics and biology. And their intuitive knowledge within each of these appears to be directly related to a hunting and gathering lifestyle long, long ago in prehistory."

(p. 56) "The conclusive evidence we have seen for content-rich mental modules has predominantly come from children aged two and three. What about the minds before and after this period?"

The developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield has suggested that up until the age of two, the child's mind is not like a Swiss army knife at all; in fact it is like that general-purpose learning program that we met earlier in this chapter. She argues that the capacities for language and object manipulation displayed by the young infant rely on the same cognitive process: it is only afterwards that modularization occurs."

RESPONSE: I question this. I have a recollection of seeing films of infants only a few months old who when seeing a car go behind a screen, look to the other side to see it come out and are surprised if it does not. However, if Greenfield is correct about this it fits in with Deacon's idea that the basis for language is mastered before the infant mind is mature enough to master the specifics of language.

(p. 56) "It is only after the age of two that the language explosion occurs; prior to that the child seems to acquire rudiments of language by using learning rules which are not restricted to language alone. The mind is running a simple, general-purpose computer program -- it has a general intelligence. Greenfield argues that in this respect the mind of a two-year-old child is similar to that of a chimpanzee, which she also sees as using general-- purpose learning processes for manipulating physical objects and symbols.... Among humans, it is only after the age of two that the content-rich mental modules containing knowledge about language, physics, psychology and biology overwhelm the general-purpose learning rules."

So we seem to have a strange metamorphosis of the mind from a computer program to a Swiss army knife. Is this metamorphosis like that of tadpole to a frog, the end of the affair, or is it like that of a caterpillar to a chrysalis - implying that the final, the most startling, change is yet to happen? Annette Karmiloff-Smith believes it is the latter and that the final stage of mental development is like the emergence of a butterfly."

(p. 57) "In her book BEYOND MODULARITY (1992) Karmiloff-Smith concurs with Greenfield that modularization is a product of development. Now for Karmiloff-Smith, the modules which develop are to some extent variable in different cultural contexts -- an idea that is anathema to the evolutionary psychologists, but which aligns her work with the ideas of Howard Gardner. She fully accepts the role of intuitive knowledge about language, psychology, biology and physics, which has indeed been conclusively demonstrated.... But for Karmiloff-Smith, these simply provide the kick-start for the development of cognitive domains. Some of the domains/faculties/intelligences that she believes develop in the mind are the same as those which the evolutionary psychologists would accept, such as language and physics. And they are constituted in the same manner: whereas C&T group mental modules into faculties, Karmiloff-Smith divides domains into micro-domains."

"But fundamental to the ideas of Karmiloff-Smith is that the cultural context in which a child develops also plays a role in determining the type of domains that arise. This is due to the plasticity of early brain development. She suggest that 'with time brain circuits are progressively selected for different domain-specific computations.' And consequently, although Pleistocene hunter-gatherers may not have been great mathematicians -- their lives did not require it -- children today may nevertheless develop a specialized cognitive domain of mathematics. The kick-start to this may lie in one of the modules of intuitive physics or some other aspect of intuitive knowledge that children are born with. In the appropriate cultural conditions this may become elaborated into a fully developed domain of mathematical knowledge, as indeed has been explored by the psychologist David Geary. The mind is still a Swiss army knife; but the types of blade present may vary from person to person."

"So Karmiloff-Smith agrees with C&T that the mind of a young child is a Swiss army knife. But for Karmiloff-Smith, this is just a stage prior to the emergence of the butterfly. For she argues that soon after modularization has occurred, the modules begin working together.... [She calls this:] 'representational redescription' (RR).... The consequence of RR is that in the mind there arise 'multiple representations of similar knowledge' and consequently 'knowledge becomes applicable beyond the special purpose goals for which it is normally used and perceptual links across domains can be forged.' In other words, thoughts can arise which combine knowledge which had previously been 'trapped' within a specific domain."

(p. 58) HOW CAN WE ACCOUNT FOR CREATIVITY? "Gardner had suggested that the wisest of human beings are those who are most able at building connections across domains -- or mappings -- as exemplified in the use of analogy and metaphor."

"Indeed this seems to be the essence of human creativity. In her book THE CREATIVE MIND (1990), Margaret Boden explores how we can account for creative thought and concludes that this arises from what she describes as the transformation of conceptual spaces. Now for Boden, a conceptual space is much like a cognitive domain, intelligence or faculty that we have been discussing."

(p. 59) "[Paul Rozin]... argued that the processes of evolution should result in a host of modules within the mind.... But the critical question that he asked is how can behavioral flexibility evolve? C&T suggest that this comes from simply adding more and more specialized devices to the Swiss army knife. Rozin, on the other hand, argued that some form of accessibility between mental modules/domains is the critical feature in both child development and evolution: the 'hall mark for the evolution of intelligence ... is that a capacity first appears in a narrow context and later becomes extended into other domains.' That statement could easily switch places with that by Karmiloff-Smith written almost two decades later: 'knowledge becomes applicable beyond the special purpose goals for which it is normally used.'"

"All of these arguments by Fodor, Gardner, Karmiloff-Smith, Carey, Spelke and Rozin appear to do away with a strictly modular architecture for the fully developed modern mind. This lack of modularity appears essential to creative thought. But the cognitive scientist Dan Sperber has argued that we can have it both ways -- a strictly modular but also a highly creative modern mind. He has argued that during the course of evolution the mind has simply evolved another, and rather special, module. This he calls the 'module of metarepresentation' (MMR).... Whereas the other modules of the mind contain concepts and representations of things, such as those about dogs and what dogs do, Sperber suggests that this new module only holds 'concepts of concepts' and 'representations of representations.'"

(p. 64) "Let me now simply state the three broad architectural phases for the evolution of the mind that will serve as the framework for interpreting the archaeological and fossil data in later chapters, prior to elaborating on these in the rest of this chapter."

"Phase 1. Minds dominated by a domain of general intelligence -- a suite of general-purpose learning and decision-making rules."

"Phase 2. Minds in which general intelligence has been supplemented by multiple specialized intelligences, each devoted to a specific domain of behavior, and each working in isolation from the others."

"Phase 3. Minds in which the multiple specialized intelligences appear to be working together, with a flow of knowledge and ideas between behavioral domains."

"The correspondence between these and the development processes described in the previous chapter should be clear. The first is paralleled by the domain-general learning processes identified as critical to the very young infant; the second parallels the modularization of the mind with the development of domain-specific thought and knowledge; and the third parallels what Karmiloff-Smith describes as 'representational redescription' and Carey and Spelke describe as 'mapping across domains' -- when knowledge becomes available for use in multiple domains of activity."

"These three broad phases are suggested as no more than a hypothetical framework for guiding the rest of my study."

(p. 66-68)

"This general intelligence would have been constituted by a suite of general-purpose learning and decision-making rules. Their essential features are that they can be used to modify behavior in the light of experience in any behavioral domain. But they can only produce relatively simple behavior -- the rate of learning would be slow, errors would be frequent and complex behavior patterns could not be acquired."

(p. 68-70)

"...[T]here are likely to have been at least three... intelligences in the second phase:"

"1. The traces of an intuitive psychology imply a chapel of social intelligence, used for interacting with other human individuals, and including modules for 'mind reading.'"

"2. Similarly the traces of an intuitive biology within the modern mind suggests that there was once a chapel of natural history intelligence -- a bundle of modules concerned with understanding the natural world, and understanding essential to life as a hunter-gatherer."

"3. Intuitive physics may be the surviving foundations of a chapel of technical intelligence that once existed in the minds of some of our early ancestors, housing the mental modules for the manufacture and manipulation of stone and wooden artifacts, including those for throwing such artifacts."

"A critical design feature of these chapels is that their walls are thick and almost impenetrable.... There is no access between the chapels. In other words, knowledge about different behavioral domains cannot be combined together. Moreover the modules used for thinking within each intelligence are largely restricted to that intelligence alone."

"There may be a fourth chapel within the cathedrals of this phase: that of linguistic intelligence. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is also constituted by a bundle of mental modules. But could linguistic intelligence ever have been isolated from the other intelligences of the mind? Unlike them it serves no function in itself -- people do not talk about grammar for its own sake.... So at present, while we recognize that a chapel of linguistic intelligence may have existed, we cannot specify its architectural relationship to general intelligence and the other specialized intelligences."

RESPONSE: It is my recollection that study of infant language indicates that when at least two infants are raised together they spontaneously begin to create their own language that they use to communicate. If this is true it seems clear they are tapping into some innate structure/ structures within the human brain.

(p. 70-72)

"The minds of the third phase share a new architectural feature: direct access between the chapels. With this feature, knowledge once trapped within different chapels can now be integrated together. It is not quite clear how this direct access was achieved."

"Experience gained in one behavioral domain can now influence that in another. Indeed distinct behavioral domains no longer exist. And brand new ways of thinking, subjects to think about, and ways to behave arise. The mind acquires not only the ability but a positive passion for metaphor or analogy."

"...[W]hen thoughts originating in different domains can engage together, the result is an almost limitless capacity for imagination. So we should refer to these Phase 3 minds as having a 'cognitive fluidity.'"

"How should we date the different phases of our architectural history? When in the course of human evolution did the architectural plans encode information for the construction of no more than a central nave? When were chapels first built? Were they built simultaneously, or introduced piecemeal so that there was a gradual change from Phase 1 to Phase 2 buildings? How did the chapel of linguistic intelligence fit in? When was the direct access between chapels first created? How was this direct access achieved....?"

"...[T]he landscape we must now explore is not occupied by churches and abbeys; it is one populated by chimpanzees. We must try to expose the architecture of the chimpanzee mind, because this is likely to share features with that of the common ancestor of 6 million years ago."

(p. 73) "Act 1 of our prehistory begins 6 million years ago. But, as we saw in Chapter 2, the stage is bare and our actor, the missing link, is absent. There are no bones or artifacts to inspect which might give clues to past behavior and past mental activity. How then can we reconstruct the mind of this distant ancestor? To what architectural phase should we assign their mind? Phase 1, with no more than a general intelligence? Or perhaps Phase 2, with one or more specialized cognitive domains working alongside, but locked off from each other and a general intelligence? How can we use the mind of the missing link to help in understanding the prehistory of the mind? These are all challenging questions to answer."

"Our only hope is to take a look at that great ape from whom our forebearers diverged on the ancestral family tree 6 million years ago: the chimpanzee."

There is a long history in science of using the chimpanzee as an analogy for our earliest human ancestor. This assumes that there has been minimal cognitive evolution during the last 6 million years along the ape line. We can indeed be confident that there has not been significant evolution in terms of brain processing power, for the brain size of the chimpanzee at about 450 cc is not significantly less than that of the australopithecines and a figure that seems reasonable for the missing link. Similarly, as we go back in time from H. erectus, to H. habilis, to A. afarensis and A. ramidus, anatomy becomes increasingly ape-like in character -- more and more like that of living chimpanzees. And if we look at the archaeological record that chimpanzees leave behind them, it is practically indistinguishable from that of our earliest ancestors because it hardly exists at all. There are no more than a few stone flakes (unintentionally created when hammering nuts) which can barely be distinguished from flakes created by natural processes. Such flakes are likely to have been lost within the litter of nature."

"So we will follow convention and assume that the mind of the chimpanzee is a good approximation for the mind of the missing link. What does the behavior of chimpanzees tell us about the architecture of their minds? Let us start with a type of behavior which was once thought to be uniquely human -- the manufacture and use of tools -- and ask whether chimpanzees have a chapel of technical intelligence."

(p. 74) "Fifty years ago it was generally believed that humans were the only species to make and use tools, summed up in the epithet 'Man the toolmaker.' Then in the late 1950s Jane Goodall began to study wild chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania and soon described how the chimpanzees stripped leaves off sticks to use as probes for ants and to make fishing sticks for termites. Since that time many other observations of chimpanzee tool manufacture and use have been made by researchers such as by Bill McGrew and Chistophe and Hedwige Boesch. We now know that a wide range of tools are made, and used for a variety of tasks, by chimpanzees. In addition to catching insects, small sticks are used for acquiring honey, removing nuts from their shells, picking bits of brain from skulls, and cleaning eye orbits. Leaves are crushed together to form a sponge to gather up ants or water. Leaves are also used by chimpanzees to clean the cranial cavities of prey, and to clean themselves. They even use leaves as a plate -- a plate to catch their own feces which are then inspected for undigested food items. In the forest of west Africa chimpanzees use hammers and anvils to crack open nuts.... In sum, chimpanzees appear adept at manufacturing and manipulating physical objects. Does this imply that they have specialized cognitive processes dedicated to such tasks -- does their mental architecture have a chapel of technical intelligence? Or do chimpanzees simply rely on the processes of general intelligence, such as trial-and-error learning, for making and using tools?"

"As a first stab at answering this question we might consider how complex chimpanzee tool behavior appears to be: the more complex it is, the more likely it is to arise from specialized cognitive processes."

(p. 76) "The gist of my argument should now have become clear: we cannot attribute chimpanzees with specialized cognitive processes dedicated to the manipulation and transformation of physical objects; i.e., a technical intelligence.... Chimpanzees appear to have cultural traditions regarding tool use."

"These differences cannot be explained on genetic or ecological grounds alone: chimpanzee tool use appears to be largely based on tradition.... Human cultural traditions are usually about different ways of doing the same task, rather than whether that task is undertaken or not.... Chimpanzee tool-use traditions appear fundamentally different from human cultural traditions.... It is the absence of a technical intelligence."

(p. 77) "This conclusion can be strengthened when we actually look at the pattern of learning about tool use. Recall that the intuitive physics and technical intelligence within the human mind facilitate rapid and efficient learning about the world of objects. Now if we see chimpanzees struggling to learn about the simplest object manipulation tasks, this may indicate that their minds lack such intuitive knowledge. And this is precisely what we do see."

"...[E]ach generation of chimpanzees appears to struggle to attain the technical level attained by the previous generation."

(p. 78) "Here is a summary of the evidence about toolmaking and using by chimpanzees. Their tools are very simple. They are made by using physical actions common to other domains of behavior. They are used for a limited range of tasks, and chimpanzees appear to be rather poor at thinking about new ways to use tools. They are slow at adopting the tool-use methods currently practised within their group. Now these attributes do not constitute the type of behavioral repertoire that we would expect if the chimpanzee mind had a technical intelligence devoted to manipulating and transforming physical objects. They are much more like those we would expect from the use of a general intelligence -- processes such as trial and error and associative learning -- which are not specifically designed for making and using tools."

"Chimpanzee tool use is predominantly about getting food. So we must now turn to foraging and ask whether the chimpanzee mind has a natural history [biology/geography] intelligence in terms of a suite of cognitive processes dedicated to acquiring and proposing information about resources, such as plants, animals and raw materials."

(p. 79) "Chimpanzees appear to rely on noticing and remembering sufficient information about the environment on their daily travels."

"...[Current data] leave us in a rather equivocal position regarding the possibility of a specialized domain of natural history intelligence. Certain elements of this appear to be present: the interest and ability to build up a large database of natural history knowledge and the processing of this to make efficient foraging decisions. Yet this is effectively no more than rote memory -- there does not seem to be a creative or insightful use of that knowledge.... We need to look for further evidence regarding chimpanzee interaction with the natural world, which we can find by considering a rather more challenging type of foraging behavior -- hunting."

(p. 81) "To summarize, the cognitive basis for the chimpanzee's interaction with the natural world is difficult to assess. On the one hand there is the acquisition of large amounts of information, and the processing of it to make efficient foraging decisions. On the other hand there appears to be a marked absence of a creative use of such knowledge; foraging behavior appears to be characterized by a significant degree of inflexibility. And there is severe doubt that chimpanzees are proficient at reading the mass of visual clues available in the environment. The most reasonable conclusion is to attribute the chimpanzee mind with some micro-domains enabling the construction of mental maps, but not a fully developed natural history intelligence."

"In 1988 a remarkable collection of papers was published in a book entitled MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans. Edited by Dick Byrne and Andrew Whiten, some of the papers had been originally published more than 30 years ago. They all contribute to making one major argument: that there is something very special about the cognitive processes used for social interaction.... In effect they argued that monkeys and apes have a discrete domain of social intelligence, constituted by a whole bundle of mental modules. The term Machiavellian seemed particularly apposite since cunning, deception, and the construction of alliances and friendships are pervasive in the social life of many primates."

(p. 82) "One of the best accounts of this tangled social web within which chimpanzees live is Franz de Waal's marvellous description of the chimpanzee politics he witnessed during his observations of a colony at the Burgers' zoo, Arnhem. He provides a story of ambition, social manipulation, sexual privileges, and power takeovers that would put any aspiring politician to shame...."

RESPONSE: For more on de Waal's writings relevant to Science of Religion see VOLUME II, Chapter 18-A, "Ethics, Morality, and a Science of Religion."

(p. 84) "The essence of a theory of mind is that it allows an individual to predict the behavior of another. Social life is about building and testing hypotheses -- unlike decision making in chimpanzee foraging activity, which is simply rote memory. Nicholas Humphrey argues that this is the biological function of consciousness. In effect we explore our own mind and use it as the best model we have for the mind of another individual. We reflect on how we would feel and behave in a particular context and assume that another individual will do likewise. This is a very powerful argument for the evolution of reflexive consciousness: it is elegant, makes common sense and conforms to all we understand about evolution. It persuades me that chimpanzees have a conscious awareness of their own minds. But if Humphrey is correct, this conscious awareness should extend only to their thoughts about social interaction. If consciousness is a trick to predict the behavior of others, there is no evolutionary reason why chimpanzees should have a conscious awareness about their (limited) thoughts about toolmaking or foraging. Yet our own conscious awareness seems to cover our thoughts about all domains of activity. We will see as this prehistory of the mind unfolds that the broadening of conscious awareness has a very critical role to play in creating the modern mind."

"Chimpanzees cannot talk to us because they do not have the vocal apparatus to do so. But do they have the cognitive basis for language? If we could plug a chimpanzee into a pair of vocal cords, would the chimpanzee have much to say? Well we cannot do this, but the next best thing has been to teach chimpanzees the use of sign language."

(p. 87) "...[T]he whole pattern of acquiring language is so radically different between apes and humans that it is difficult to imagine how ape language could ever have been thought of as anything other than a very weak analogy for that of humans."

"...[W]e do not appear to be witnessing in these language acquisition experiments the release of some latent linguistic ability, trapped in the animals' minds by the absence of vocal cords. We simply see clever chimps at work, using aspects of general intelligence such as associative learning to understand the links between a set of signs and their referents, and how to combine those signs to gain rewards. Using a general-purpose learning rule for language acquisition can take a chimpanzee only so far toward learning vocabulary and grammar: that distance appears to be similar to the 'language' of a two-year-old human child. And recall, as we saw in the previous chapter, that up to the age of two human children may also be using generalized learning rules for language -- the language explosion only occurs after that age, with specialized language modules coming into operation. But no such thing happens in the chimpanzee mind. There is no linguistic intelligence."

(p. 88) "We have tried to establish the cognitive processes that lie behind tool use, foraging, social behavior and 'language' acquisition by chimpanzees. How is the architectural plan of the chimpanzee mind shaping up?"

"There appear to be three main features.... The first is a general intelligence, which includes modules for trial and error learning, and associative learning. These are used for a wide range of tasks: making foraging decisions, learning about tool use, acquiring an understanding of symbolic meanings. We should not minimize the importance of this general intelligence: chimpanzees are without doubt clever chimps. Secondly, there is a specialized domain of social intelligence. This enables a chimpanzee's interaction with the social world to be an order of magnitude greater in complexity than its interaction with the non-social world, involving aspects such as hypothesis formation which are evidently lacking from foraging behavior and tool use. Thirdly, there is a small set of mental modules concerned with building up large mental databases about resource distribution, an incipient natural history intelligence."

(p. 92) "If chimpanzees had a 'technical intelligence' we would expect to see them performing very little better with tools in the laboratory than in the wild; on the other hand, if they are simply clever chimps in terms of having general intelligence, the more stimulus and encouragement they receive, the better tool and language users they are likely to become. This seems to be precisely what we observe. Social behavior, on the other hand, is already built upon a base of specialized cognitive processes and is not significantly influenced by an increased intensity of social interaction when in captivity."

(p. 94) "To summarize, a specialized domain of social intelligence first appeared in the course of human evolution after 55 million years ago. This gradually increased in complexity with the addition of further mental modules, such as that for a theory of mind between 35 and 6 million years ago. As this domain of social intelligence increased in complexity, so too did the capacity for general intelligence. And mental modules first appeared relating to foraging activity, enabling the mind to construct large databases of resources distribution."

(p. 95) "The first scene of the second act begins 4.5 million years ago and has three actors, Australopithicus ramidus, A. anamensis and A. afarensis. As I noted in Chapter 2, we can learn a certain amount about their behavior from the few fossil fragments of these species that survive, but we have no direct evidence of their toolmaking -- if indeed they made tools at all -- and foraging activities. With the start of scene two at 2.5 million years ago there is a rush of actors on to the stage: first the later australopithecines and then by 2 million years ago the earliest members of the Homo lineage. The fossil fragments of these show significant anatomical and thus behavioral developments, such as the appearance of more effective bipedalism -- habitual walking on two legs.... Moreover we can see our ancestors setting off in two different evolutionary directions. The australopithecines went down a route of ever-increasing robusticity as specialized plant-grinding machines, while early Homo took a more cerebral route of increasing brain size. It is the mind of the earliest Homo which is the subject of this chapter."

"There are likely to have been several species of early Homo at this time, but I will use the shorthand in this chapter of referring to one single species H. habilis.... [W]e now have direct evidence for foraging and toolmaking in the form of scatter of stone tools and the debris from their manufacture, as well as scatters of bone fragments of the animals that were exploited.... My aim is to reconstruct the architecture of the mind of H. habilis. I must start with the hardest evidence available, Oldowan stone tools, and ask whether there was a specialized domain of technical intelligence."

(p. 96) "To detach the type of flakes one finds in the sites of Olduvai Gorge, one needs to recognize acute angles on the nodules, to select so-called striking platforms and to employ good hand-eye- co-ordination to strike the nodule in the correct place, in the right direction and with the appropriate amount of force. Members of H. habilis were working stone nodules in a fundamentally different manner from the way chimpanzees work their raw materials. They could indeed locate appropriate angles and adjust the force and direction of their striking actions."

(p. 98) "...[T]he aim of Oldowan artifact makers appears to have been simply to produce flakes with sharp edges, and nodules which could be held in the hand while having sufficient mass for tasks such as breaking open bones for marrow.... We can see no evidence for an intentional imposition of form. We should also note that although working stone is technically more demanding than stripping leaves off twigs, the Oldowan toolmakers, mainly using stone such as basalt and quartzite, appear to have been unable to work more intractable rocks such as cherts."

"We must conclude, therefore, on a rather equivocal note. On the one hand the making of Oldowan stone tools requires an understanding of fracture dynamics that appears beyond the capacity of the chimpanzee mind. On the other hand the stasis in Oldowan technology, the absence of imposed form and the preference for the easier raw materials prevent us attributing H. habilis with a technical intelligence beyond that of a few micro-domains."

(p. 99) "While Oldowan stone tools are likely to have been used for a variety of purposes, their main function was probably the processing of animal carcasses. The sharp flakes were most likely used to cut hide and tendons, and to remove pieces of meat. The heavy nodules were probably employed to smash apart joints, or to break open bones to remove marrow. This takes us, therefore, to a second aspect of H. habilis life-styles for which we might expect specialized cognitive processes to have evolved: interaction with the natural world."

"...[M]embers of H. habilis were consuming larger quantities of meat. We know this because many archaeological sites dating between 2 and 1.5 million years ago have large numbers of fragments of animal bones intermingled with stone artifacts."

(p. 103) "Yet in spite of the intensity of research, our understanding of H. habilis subsistence patterns remains limited, with no consensus about the extent of hunting and scavenging, the use of central places or of routed foraging. Two factors explain this lack of consensus. First, the archaeological record is probably just too poorly preserved to make inferences about H. habilis lifestyles with regard to day-to-day activities. Second -- and rather more optimistically -- the true answer to the H. habilis lifestyle is probably that it was marked by diversity; a flexibility between hunting and scavenging, and between food sharing and feed-as-you-go, to suit the particular ecological circumstances of the moment. H. habilis is likely to have been behaviorally flexible, a non-specialized forager."

"It is indeed most likely that meat eating was a regular part of the diet of H. habilis. In addition to the animal bones, sometimes showing butchery cutmarks from the stone tools found at archaeological sites, the relatively large brain of H. habilis implies the consumption of a high quality diet, measured in terms of calorific intake per unit of food. The brain is a highly expensive organ in terms of the quality of energy it consumes. As the anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler have argued, to compensate for the amount of energy used by an enlarged brain, the requirements of another part of the body must be reduced to maintain a stable basal metabolic rate. They argue that this has to be the gut; as the brain gets bigger, the gut has to get smaller. And the only way for the gut to get smaller is by increasing the quality of the diet, such as by the consumption of greater quantities of meat as opposed to plant foods. So the fact that H. habilis has a brain size significantly larger than the australopithecines suggest that meat had become a larger part of the diet -- whether or not the intellectual challenge of finding animal carcasses provided a selective pressure for brain enlargement. Indeed... the need to live within larger groups was probably a far more important selective pressure in this regard.

(p. 104) "In contrast to monkeys, chimpanzees and the 6-million-year-old common ancestor, members of H. habilis are likely to have been able to read the visual clues indicating that a carnivore was in the vicinity."

"Members of H. habilis are likely to have needed one further cognitive trick -- the ability to use their natural history knowledge to develop hypotheses about carcass/animal location."

(p. 105) "...[M]uch of H. habilis activity appears to be constrained to a narrow range of environments in comparison to the humans who appear in the fossil record after 1.8 million years ago.... [I]t appears unlikely that any Homo prior to H. erectus moved out of their African evolutionary environment. Even within the region of East Africa the activity of H. habilis was focused in a narrow range of microenvironments, as compared with the wide range of environments exploited by H. erectus, let alone modern humans. Much of the activity of H. habilis appears to have been 'tied' to the edges of permanent water sources."

"Hominids appear to have repeatedly returned to such locations in spite of fairly substantial changes in fauna, climate and landscape. The diversity of the faunal remains on the sites, with regard to body size and habitat preference, suggest that members of H. habilis did range quite widely into a variety of microenvironments when procuring animal parts. The fact that these were repeatedly transported to the same type of environmental context implies the absence of the behavioral flexibility indicative of a full natural history intelligence."

"Let me summarize the evidence we have for the mind of H. habilis regarding interaction with the natural world. We can start from the basis of an ability to construct large mental databases and maps for resource characteristics and distributions, as this was found in the mind of the common ancestor.... This now appears to be supplemented with abilities to develop hypotheses concerning resource location and to use inanimate visual clues. On the other hand members of H. habilis remain within a rather narrow environmental setting, and within that appear to be tethered to natural features for much of their activity. We seem to have reached a similar conclusion to that concerning technical intelligence: evolution has been at work laying further foundations for a chapel of natural history intelligence, but the walls are yet to be completed and general intelligence continued to play a dominant role in thought about the natural world."

(p. 106) "In the last chapter we saw that the common ancestor to modern humans and the chimpanzees at 6 million years ago already had a discrete domain of social intelligence. How, if at all, had the nature of social intelligence change by the time of H. habilis?

"To address this question we must begin with a short digression and think about the problems of group living, soap operas and brain size. As a general rule the more people that one chooses to live with, the more complex life becomes: there is a wider choice of possible partners with whom to share food or sex, and each of those partners will have a greater number and more diverse relationships with other members of the group. It is a considerable challenge to keep track of who is friend with whom, who are enemies, and who bear grudges or desires, and then to try to decide with whom to make friends without upsetting your other friends. We have all had some experience of this. In fact we seem to quite enjoy the social maneuverings that become paramount as groups enlarge, especially if we are bystanders. Why else are soap operas so popular."

"It is therefore not surprising to find that among living primate species there is a strong positive relationship between group size and brain size.... Dick Byrne concurs with this result by finding a strong positive relationship between brain size and the frequency of deception in social strategies -- the more complex the social scene, the more devious you are going to need to be to win more friends without winning more enemies."

(p. 107) "There is good circumstantial evidence that H. habilis would have been living in larger groups than their ancestors. If we again look at modern primates, there appear to be two ecological situations in which primates choose to live in larger groups, and suffer the accompanying social challenges. One of these is when they face a high risk from predators.... The other ecological condition which favors group living is when food comes in large parcels that are irregularly distributed around the landscape."

The evidence supports the existence of both of these conditions for H. habilis.

"We have therefore good ecological criteria for believing that H. habilis would be choosing to live in relatively large groups, and their large brain size implies that they had the social intelligence to do so. In other words the enlarged brain of the H. habilis suggests that the domain of social intelligence has become yet more powerful and complex. What might the new elements have been? We can only speculate, but one possibility is that they could cope with more 'orders of intentionality' than could their chimpanzee-like ancestors."

(p. 108) "'Orders of intentionality' is a term that the philosopher Daniel Dennett introduced to help us think about how social intelligence works. If I believe you to know something, then I can cope with one 'order of intentionality.' If I believe that you believe that I know something, then I can cope with two orders of intentionality. If I believe that you believe that my wife believes that I know something, then I can cope with three orders of intentionality. We modern humans regularly encounter three orders of intentionality.... Five orders of intentionality seem to be our limit. Daniel Dennett demonstrated this quite effectively when he asked if 'you wonder whether I realize how hard it is for you to be sure that you understand whether I mean to be saying that you recognize that I can believe you to want me to explain that most of us can keep track of only about five or six orders of intentionality under the best of conditions.' Under the best of conditions chimpanzees are likely to manage just two orders of intentionality. Perhaps the new architectural features in the chapel of social intelligence had increased this to three or four in early Homo."

"Did... [H. habilis] have a capacity for language?"

(p. 109) "Language is a modularized cognitive capacity, reliant on its own unique neural processes.... [A]nd vocalizations of very young children prior to their development of language, as well as those of chimpanzees, derive from 'general intelligence' rather than language modules.... [F]ully developed language relies on mental modules specialized for language alone; we cannot infer the existence of these in the mind of H. habilis from the character of the physical objects being made."

"Can we infer a linguistic capacity from the shape of the brain itself? The neural processes which provide the capacity for language appear to be concentrated in specific areas of the brain, principally in the left hemisphere. Within this area, two regions appear to be particularly important: Broca's area and Wernicke's area.... People who have suffered damage to either of these lose some of their linguistic capacity. Damage to Broca's area appears mainly to affect the use of grammar, while that to Wernicke's area affects comprehension. Damage to the connecting tissue between these areas, or to the tissue that connects these areas to the rest of the brain, can also result in severe language defects. But the relationships between specific parts of the brain and specific features of language are complex and little understood; all that we can be truly confident about is that certain areas of the brain are important for language."

(p. 110) "Phillip Tobias, one of the foremost authorities on the evolution of the brain.... is confident that a significant development of Broca's area can be seen [in a fossil skull of a 2-million-year-old H. habilis fossil], which has been confirmed by the work of another leading specialist, Dean Falk. In contrast, no such development of Broca's area can be seen in the brains of the australopithecines."

(p. 112-114) "The toolmaking and foraging behavior of H. habilis is certainly more complex than that of chimpanzees and what we expect of the common ancestor. Both the production of stone tools and the regular exploitation of animal carcasses are likely to have required specialized cognitive processes of a type absent from the chimpanzee mind. H. habilis appears to have been able to understand the fracture dynamics of stone and to have constructed hypotheses about resource distributions, both of which are likely to be beyond the capacity of general intelligence that dominates the toolmaking and foraging behavior of the chimpanzee. Yet these specialized cognitive processes in the mind of H. habilis do not appear to be embedded within a matrix of other specialized processes relating to the same domain of activity. General intelligence appears to have continued to play an important role in conditioning toolmaking and foraging behavior of H. habilis. And as a consequence, the making of stone artifacts and the exploitation of animal carcasses appear to be thoroughly integrated. They seem to be part of a single stream of activity, just as we recognized for the tool-using and foraging behavior of the chimpanzee."

"Social intelligence has become more complex and powerful than that within the mind of the chimpanzee. But it remains just as isolated from the thoughts about tookmaking and foraging as in the chimpanzee mind. There is no evidence that H. habilis used tools in social strategies. As noted above, the form of Oldowan artifacts appears to reflect no more than the character of the original nodule and the number of flakes removed. There is no imposition of social information on to the tools, as is pervasive among modern humans. Similarly, there are no examples in the archaeological record of spatial structure on archaeological sites which might reflect a social use of space. Material culture was not used in social strategies, even though we must conclude that those social strategies were even more complex and Machiavellian than we see among chimpanzees today."

"Yet this increased social complexity is likely to have had a passive influence over the foraging and technical behavior of H. habilis. As we saw in the previous chapter, the complexity of the tool-using and hunting behavior of the Tai chimpanzees, as compared with those of Gombe, can partly be attributed to their larger group size and more intense social relationships. These provided greater opportunities for social learning and the cultural transmission of behavioral patterns. From this perspective, much of the increase in behavioral complexity of H. habilis over that of the common ancestor, in terms of the manufacture of stone tools and the exploitation of animal carcasses, might simply be accounted for as a spin-off from increased social complexity. The frequent use of the term 'food sharing' when discussing the behavior of early Homo is probably misleading. It is more appropriate to view this as 'tolerated theft.' In terms of the play that is our past, the extra power and complexity of social intelligence appears to be the most important feature to explain the action of the second scene of Act 2."

"In summary, the architectural plans inherited by members of H. habilis encoded the construction of a mental cathedral that appears to have had the same basic design as that encoded in the mind of the common ancestor 6 million years ago. The nave was larger, the chapel of social intelligence more elaborate, the walls of the chapels of technical and natural history intelligence a little higher and incorporating more modules. But those chapels remained incomplete."

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1. THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, Steven Mithen, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996.