"While we still have much to learn about our ancestors of Act 2, discussed in the previous chapter, we can nevertheless accept that their ways of life were fine-tuned adaptations to the African woodland and savannahs between 4.5 and 1.8 million years ago. Because their lifestyles are so alien to us, it seems clear how they should be studied: since we have reconstructed the behavior of the earliest Homo, for instance, we try to understand it as if we were an ecologist trying to understand the behavior of any other primate species. We can also feel confident about how we should approach the performance of Act 4, especially in the second and third scenes after 60,000 years ago. During that period the pace of cultural change is so fast that it feels familiar, because this is precisely what we are accustomed to in our own short lives. And for the majority of these scenes we have a single type of human improvising the script -- ourselves, H. sapiens sapiens."

"Between these two periods we find the no-one's land of Act 3, where neither ecologist nor anthropologist can tread with confidence. Indeed this also applies to much of the first scene of Act 4, particularly when we are looking at the behavior of the final Neanderthals. During these periods some features of the actor's behavior seem so familiar to us that we could readily believe that they have the modern mind; but in other ways their behavior appears as alien as that of the earliest Homo on the African savannah. Act 3 is indeed a period full of puzzles -- we will come across eight of them within this chapter."

(p. 116) "Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the salient points of the third act."

"Act 3 has an exciting start: the appearance of H. erectus 1.8 million years ago, followed by new types of stone tools, handaxes, 1.4 million years ago. Through the course of this act we watch how H. erectus diversifies and evolves into a range of new human ancestors. While the size of the brain appears to have remained stable between 1.8 and 0.5 million years ago -- as H. erectus and its immediate descendants colonized much of the Old World -- this period is brought to a close by a return to a period of rapidly expanding brain size, similar to that which had happened 2 million years ago, and which ends at around 200,000 years ago with the brain at an equivalent size to that of Modern Humans today. The new larger-brained actors after 500,000 years ago are classified as types of archaic H. sapiens in Africa and China, while in Europe the scant fossil remains are referred to as H. heidelbergensis. This last species then seems to give rise to H. neanderthalensis -- the Neanderthals -- found in Europe and the Near East after about 150,000 years ago and which survives in Europe until as late as 30,000 years ago. For this chapter I am going to group all of these actors together and refer to them as 'Early Humans' to distinguish them from H. sapiens sapiens appearing at the start of Act 4, whom I will refer to as 'Modern Humans.'"

"While these evolutionary events were occurring, the scenery was going through a hectic series of changes. This period of our past is dominated by a succession of global environmental changes as the planet went through at least eight major glacial-interglacial cycles."

"So with regard to the evolution of human anatomy and climatic change, Act 3 is teeming with action. But the props that the actors are using do not seen to match this tempo of change. After the initial appearance of the handaxe at 1.4 million years ago, we have a single major technical innovation at around 250,000 years ago with the appearance of a new production technique called the Levallois method. But other than this there seem to be hardly any changes in material culture. Indeed many of the props seem little different from those used by H. habilis on the African savannah in Act 2. As a whole, the archaeological record between 1.4 million and 100,000 years ago seems to revolve around an almost limitless number of minor variations on a small set of technical and economic themes."

(p. 117) "By the start of Act 3, over 4 million years have passed since the time of the common ancestor. This has taken us to a mind with two dominant features: a bundle of mental modules dedicated to social interaction alone, which can be characterized as a discrete social intelligence, and a suite of generalized learning and problem-solving rules which are used irrespective of the behavioral domain and are referred to as general intelligence. Supplementing these are a number of specialized mental modules which relate to understanding physical objects and the natural world, although these appear to be relatively few in number. We must now see what happens to this mind during the next act of prehistory."

"As I have just indicated, there are several different types of human ancestors during this act, each of whom is likely to have had a slightly different type of mental architecture. I say 'slightly' because I am going to start with the premise that the similarities between their mental architectures are more significant than the differences. My aim in this chapter is to try to reconstruct the architecture for a generic Early Human mind, drawing freely on data from the different types of Early Humans of this act. Indeed I will also step into the start of Act 4, when looking at the behavior of the last of the Neanderthals -- behavior that appears to be no different from that of Act 3, but which can be reconstructed in rather more detail. Only at the end of this chapter will I try to draw some distinctions between the mental architectures of H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis, thereby exploring the evolution of the mind during the course of Act 3."

"In order to proceed, we must consider the evidence for each of the four cognitive domains.... technical, natural history [biology/geography], social, and linguistic intelligence -- as well as considering how these interacted, if at all."

"We must begin by recognizing a quite dramatic increase in technical skill over that possessed by H. habilis in Act 2. The most characteristic artifact produced by Early Humans was the handaxe.... They often display high degrees of symmetry, sometimes simultaneously in three dimensions, and indicate that the knapper was imposing form on to the artifact, rather than just creating sharp edges as with an Oldowan chopper."

"The difficulty in achieving a symmetrical handaxe of a specified form has been stressed by Jacques Pelegrin, who has many years' experience at replicating handaxes. He has explained how the goal of the knapper is not simply to obtain a sharp cutting edge but to extricate an artifact of a specific form independent from the starting shape of that nodule. Planning ahead is essential if symmetry is to be achieved, and maintained as the piece is developed.... [T]o produce standardized forms, the knapper needs to exploit and adapt his or her toolmaking knowledge, rather than just follow a fixed set of rules in a rote fashion."

(p. 119) "Many of the above comments regarding the technical difficulty in producing handaxes also apply to the use of the Levallois method -- the archetypal knapping technique used by the Neanderthals."

(p. 121) "We have seen evidence for an advanced technical intelligence among Early Humans. There can be little doubt that in terms of understanding the fracture dynamics of stone, and putting that understanding into practice to make stone artifacts conforming to a series of preconceived mental templates, Early Humans possessed equivalent abilities to the Modern Humans of Act 4. But, when we consider other features of Early Human technology we see types of behavior that are in dramatic contrast to those of Modern Humans. There are indeed four puzzles about Early Human technology:"

"Puzzle 1. Why did Early Humans ignore bone, antler, and ivory as raw materials?"

(p. 122) "Puzzle 2. Why did Early Humans not make tools designed for specific purposes? These show hardly any variability in size and shape across the Old World, although many different types of animals were hunted."

"Puzzle 3. Why did Early Humans not make multi-component tools? There is nothing to suggest that H. erectus hafted [provided a handle for] any stone artifacts."

(p. 123) "Puzzle 4. Why did Early Human stone tools show such limited degrees of variation across time and space?"

"So before finding the solution to these puzzles we must consider the nature of this interaction with the environment, and in so doing examine a second cognitive domain of the Early Human mind: natural history intelligence."

"Natural history intelligence is an amalgam of at least three sub-domains of thought: that about animals, that about plants and that about the geography of the landscape, such as the distribution of water sources and caves. As a whole it is about understanding the geography of the landscape, the rhythms of the seasons, and the habits of potential game. It is about using current observations of the natural world to predict the future: the meaning of cloud formations, of animal footprints, of the arrival and departure of birds in the spring and autumn."

(p. 124) "...[T]he presence of Early Humans from Pontnewydd Cave, North Wales, in the far northwest corner of the Old World to the Cape of South Africa implies a sophisticated natural history intelligence."

"Yet Early Humans remained absent from several regions of the Old World, and made no entry into Australasia or the Americas.... Early Humans were unable to cope with very dry and very cold environments. These appear to have been too challenging...."

(p. 130) "Solving the puzzle of Early Human technology."

"The first was the absence of artifacts made from bone, antler or ivory. This can only be explained by recognizing that Early Humans could not think of using such materials for tools: these materials were once parts of animals and animals were thought about in the domain of natural history intelligence."

(p. 131) "A cognitive barrier preventing the integration of knowledge about animal behavior and toolmaking also appears to explain the second puzzle, the absence of artifacts dedicated to specific activities. As we saw above, Early Humans relied on general-purpose tools -- they did not design specific tools for specific tasks. To do so would have required an integration of technical and natural history intelligence.... When activity at the domain interface of toolmaking and hunting was required, this was undertaken by general intelligence and resulted in behavioral simplicity."

"This also explains the third puzzle: the absence of tools with multiple components. Among modern hunter-gatherers these are principally produced with specific types of prey in mind.... If animals and tools cannot be thought about in such an integrated fashion, it seems unlikely that tools with more than a few components would ever be produced."

"This same cognitive constraint might be invoked to explain the fourth puzzling feature about Early Human technology: its remarkable conservatism across time and space. There can be little doubt that the behavior of Early Humans varied across the inhabited part of the Old World as they encountered different types of resources, competed with different type of carnivores and coped with different climatic regimes. They had an advanced natural history intelligence which enabled them to adapt to new resources.... The making of stone tools simply does not appear to be fully integrated with subsistence behavior and the reason must be that thought about stone tools was inaccessible to thought about natural history. As archaeologists we are left with a million years of technical monotony that mask a million years of socially and economically flexible behavior."

(p. 132) "The social intelligence of Early Humans is both the easiest and the most difficult of our cognitive domains to assess. The easy part is that we can simply assert that H. erectus, Neanderthals and other Early Humans are likely to have possessed a complex social intelligence given its existence in non-human primates and the earliest Homo...."

"The most significant piece of evidence is the size of the Early Human brain, and the implications this has for the average size of social groups...."

"...[W]e have good reason to expect that Early Humans, especially those after 200,000 years ago, were as socially intelligent as Modern Humans."

RESPONSE: That's a very interesting statement. But its only truth for a Science of Religion is as a reminder of the work we need to do. Basically, Mithen is speaking in terms of Homo sapiens of the above time period being just as competent to deal with other individuals as we are today. In other words they could follow their "tribal" (genetic) propensities that involve social interactions as effectively as we can.

But of course what this overlooks is that our "wisdom" potential effects our apparent social intelligence just as it does our apparent technical intelligence. Science has built on a firm foundation that has allowed usable knowledge to accumulate over the many hundreds of years of scientific discovery, and technical advancement. When we have a technical problem this knowledge base and the skilled individuals necessary to use it are available. This allows all of us to display an expanded technical intelligence.

But folk religions have prevented us from developing our social intelligence correspondingly. However, a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom built on it would change that. A Science of Religion would show us how to follow our "wisdom" potential in all realms of our life, but especially in the social realm. We would thereby function as Wise Persons living within a Wise Community. As such we would draw on its resources (such as the "Knowledge Bank") in making social choices. Not only would we have a strong personal base of sound knowledge from which to solve social problems, we would also have access to powerful expert systems. Rather than just using what our individual brain can remember, access, and implement in the time available we would have much assistance available. We would be able to increase our social intelligence a hundred, or thousand fold. And this is one aspect of what a Science of Religion is about. It would make available to each person the knowledge culled from all of human history. It would help us to make our life choices based on not just the little bit available at any given moment within our own head, drawn from our own experience, but to draw from all of humanity. What we do now in the social realm is comparable to what would happen in the technical realm if we had to solve each technical problem with the tools we could assemble with our own hands on the spot.

(p. 134) "The anatomical and environmental evidence I have so far considered supports the idea that Early Humans frequently lived in large groups and had an advanced level of social intelligence. Yet as soon as we turn to the archaeological evidence we find some more puzzles. If we accept -- as we must -- that the brain size of early Humans implies a high degree of social intelligence, resulting in Machiavellian social tactics adopted by individuals often living in large groups, then four more aspects of the archaeological record are very odd indeed:"

"Puzzle 5. Why do the settlements of Early Humans imply universally small groups?"

(p. 135) "Puzzle 6. Why do distributions of artifacts on sites suggest limited social interaction?"

"Puzzle 7. Why is there an absence of items of personal decoration?"

"Puzzle 8. Why is there no evidence for ritualized burial among Early Humans?"

(p. 136) "In summary, the evidence for the social intelligence of Early Humans leaves us with a paradox. The brain size of Early Humans and the environmental evidence appear conclusively to show an advanced level of social intelligence; the archaeology shows the exact converse -- it implies that Early Humans lived in small groups apparently with little or no social structure. A resolution to this paradox is quite simple: archaeologists are making a major mistake in their interpretation of the data. They are assuming that the Early Human mind was just like the modern mind -- that there was cognitive fluidity between social, technical and natural history intelligences. We can only make sense of the archaeological record, and solve the puzzles we have found, by recognizing that these were isolated from each other. Just as there was a cognitive barrier between technical and natural history intelligence, so too were there barriers between these and social intelligence."

(p. 136) "I therefore suspect that the formalized rules for food sharing found in many modern hunter-gatherer groups were lacking among Early Humans. These often involve very strict rules which define which part of a carcass should go to which relative. The carcass is itself interpreted as a map of social relations within the group -- the distribution of meat provides a means to reinforce those social relationships. Food sharing among Early Humans was probably a rather simpler affair. Similarly I doubt if feasting took place of the kind seen in the Potlatches of the Northwest Coast Indians of America or the pig feasts among New Guinea Highlanders. In these ritualized feasts, food is used as a medium for social interaction rather than to appease hunger."

RESPONSE: Terrance Deacon in the SYMBOLIC SPECIES suggests that the use of symbols that made language possible might have been built on the basis of the marriage ceremony because of its importance to building stable societies consisting of individuals with the sexual characteristics of human beings -- long period of infant dependence, male's support necessary to its survival. But I wonder if those ceremonies might not have been built on the foundation of the symbolism of food sharing such as discussed above.

Since sharing of meat with their mate by each hunter is the fundamental assumption of how Homo was able to carve its niche, I'm currently drawing on this approach. Therefore, it seems to me we must accept that the meat sharing ceremony was the first symbolic activity and was a defining behavior for our ancestors. I, as a result, believe that it was the success in building this symbolic ritual that laid the basis for pathways between the natural history and social intelligences that the wedding ceremony was built. Probably, it originally drew heavily from the meat sharing ritual where the meat was shared with mate and family as the core of the ceremony. In fact it seems possible that this started out as just one ceremony.

(p. 136) "General intelligence is also likely to have been adequate to build the links between interaction with the social and natural environments required for coordinating group hunting. It seems improbable that either hunting or scavenging could have been successful without some degree of social cooperation, either in these activities themselves, or in terms of sharing information. But we must be careful not to exaggerate the extent of social cooperation required here: we can see cooperative hunting and information-sharing in many different types of animals, including lions and chimpanzees...."

RESPONSE: Where is languge in this group hunting endearver? I'm not willing to believe that language was only available within the social intelligence realm. If it was available there it must have been somehow available during hunting even though that was covered in the natural history intelligence module.

These hunters are interacting socially while they are hunting and must be able to communicate in the social realm even if they couldn't extend it to "talk" about hunting.

(p. 139) "In summary, the relationship between the technical and social intelligence of Early Humans appears to mirror that between technical and natural history intelligence. Just as tools were not made for specific forms of interaction with the natural world, nor were they made for specific patterns of social interaction. Just as the limited variation in technology provides a very poor reflection of the diversity of hunting and gathering behavior, so too does the limited variability in settlement size provide a poor reflection of social variability and complexity."

"A further similarity, however, is that past patterns of social behavior may be passively reflected in Early Human technology. For instance, it is apparent that those European Early Humans before 100,000 years ago who were living in small social groups in wooded environments did not make complex artifacts such as handaxes and lacked strong toolmaking traditions. A good example of these are the Early Humans who made the tools classified as the Clactonian industry in southern England, dating to before 250,00 years ago and lacking any handaxes. In contrast those who probably lived on tundra-like environments in large groups had very strong traditions, such as in the shapes of handaxes which seem to have been copied from generation to generation. Those who lived in southern England both before and after those who made Clactonian tools used the same raw materials to produce very fine handaxes. The Clactonian toolmakers simply had fewer other toolmakers to observe, and did so less frequently. Consequently there was little stimulus to enable the intuitive physics within their minds to mature into a technical intelligence, as happened when Early Humans lived in large social groups on open tundras.

(p. 140)

"There are three features of the fossil crania of Early Humans which can be used to draw inferences concerning linguistic capacities: brain size, neural structure as inferred from the shape of the brain, and the character of the vocal tract."

"With regard to brain size, the most important point is also the simplest: the brain sizes of the majority of H. erectus, and all archaic H. sapiens and Neanderthals, fall within the range of that of Modern Humans."

RESPONSE: As Deacon makes clear modern language is not just a matter of intelligence.

(p. 141) "Further support for a linguistic capacity can be found by looking at the shape of the Early Human brain, as reconstructed from the bumps on the insides of their crania.... H. habilis appears to have had a well-developed Broca's area, which is conventionally associated with speech. Broca's area also appears well formed on the H. erectus cranium... [of] a particularly well-preserved 12-year-old boy dating to 1.6 million years ago.... Ralph Holloway, in particular, has argued that both Broca's and Wernicke's areas can be identified on Neanderthal brain casts and that they show no difference from their appearance on the brains of Modern Humans."

RESPONSE: Again, if Deacon has it right modern language is more complicated than studying Broca's area. However, it seems clear that some kind of language ability has exiisted for some 2.5 million years. But not a language used in the way we use language. (p. 141) "A third source of evidence for a linguistic capacity is the nature of the vocal tract of Early Humans.... The most recent reconstructions imply that the Neanderthal vocal tract would not have differed significantly from that of Modern Humans: Neanderthals would have had essentially modern powers of vocalization and speech."

RESPONSE: Presumably -- at least in my mind -- modern language came into being over the course of the period of 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. What language was like, and specifically how it was used before that I am not able to imagine.

(p. 142) "Countering such arguments, one might point out that H. erectus, the earliest of Early Humans, appears to have been a very proficient toolmaker and forager even though his/her linguistic capacity is likely to have been rather limited. Moreover, if language was used within the technical and natural history domains of behavior as frequently and effectively as in the social domain, we would expect a greater integration between behavior in these domains. Communication by spoken language is, after all, the means by which Dan Sperber proposed that the metarepresentational module would evolve, as was described in Chapter 3."

"Consequently, I am in sympathy with the suggestion from Robin Dunbar that language first evolved to handle social information, and I believe that it remained exclusively a 'social language' for the whole of Act 3 [1.8 million - 100,000 years ago]."

RESPONSE: I buy that. (p. 142) "We have now looked at all four specialized cognitive domains of the Early Human mind, and the nature of the connections between these domains.... The archaeological data have been too sparse or ambiguous to deal with each type of Early Human in turn and to identify the cognitive variability that no doubt existed between them. There are nevertheless some pointers as to what those differences may have been."

(p. 144) "There was a very significant enlargement of brain size during the course of Act 3, from the value of 750-1250 cc for earliest H. erectus to 1200-1750 cc for Neanderthals. This was not a gradual increase: brain size appears to have been at a plateau between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago, and then to have rapidly increased in association with the appearance of archaic H. sapiens and then the Neanderthals."

"Thus while H. erectus's vocalizing capacity may have been considerably enhanced over that of any living primates, it remained too simple to be called language.... [T]he anatomy of the most complete H. erectus skeleton... suggests that the muscle control essential for the fine regulation of respiration in human speech was absent. We should perhaps think of H. erectus as having been able to produce a wide range of sounds in the context of social interaction which related to feelings of contentment, anger or desire and which mediated social relationships. But compared with Modern Humans, the range of sounds and their meanings would have been limited, with none of the grammatical rules that allow an infinite number of utterances to be made from the finite number of sounds available. Perhaps very elaborate versions of cat purring is an appropriate analogy."

RESPONSE: That sounds right on to me.

(p. 147) "In conclusion, we can safely state that in spite of linguistic differences, all Early Humans shared the same basic type of mind: a Swiss-army-knife mentality. They had multiple intelligences, each dedicated to a specific domain of behavior, with very little interaction between them. We can indeed think of the Early Human mind as a cathedral with several isolated chapels within which unique services of thought were undertaken, each barely audible elsewhere in the cathedral. We have reached Phase 2 in the architectural history proposed in Chapter 4. Early Humans seem to have been so much like us in some respects, because they had these specialized cognitive domains; but they seem so different because they lacked a vital ingredient of the modern mind: cognitive fluidity."

RESPONSE: And modern language.

(p. 147) "Before we look at what happened to the mind at the start of Act 4 with the appearance of the first Modern Humans, we must ask an important question: what would it have been like to have had the mind of an Early Human such as a Neanderthal?"

"To address this question we must return to the issue of consciousness. In this book I am following Nicholas Humphrey's argument that consciousness evolved as a cognitive trick to allow an individual to predict the social behavior of other members of his or her group. Humphrey suggests that it evolved to enable us to use our minds as models for those of other people. At some stage in our evolutionary past we became able to interrogate our own thoughts and feelings, asking ourselves how we would behave in some imagined situation. In other words, consciousness evolved as part of social intelligence."

RESPONSE: But consciousness without modern language would differ greatly from the way we know and use it today.

(p. 147) "This has significant consequences for how the stream of subjective states of awareness and sentience which would have been experienced by Neanderthals contrasts with that inside our minds today. In the Neanderthal mind social intelligence was isolated from that concerning toolmaking and interaction with the natural world. With regard to our cathedral of the mind analogy, consciousness was firmly trapped within the thick and heavy chapel walls of social intelligence -- it could not be 'heard' in the rest of the cathedral except in a heavily muffled form. As a consequence, we must conclude that Neanderthals had no conscious awareness of the cognitive process they used in the domains of technical and natural history intelligence."

"Now before pursuing this proposal I must enter the caveat that consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon that no one really understands. Whether Daniel Dennett did indeed explain consciousness in his 1991 book CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED is a moot point. Some suggest that he merely explained it away. There appear to be at least two different types of consciousness. There is the type that we refer to as 'sensation,' such as our awareness of itches on our body, color and sounds. Nicholas Humphrey calls this a 'lower order' of consciousness than that which relates to reasoning and reflection about one's own mental states. It is this higher order of 'reflexive consciousness' which I suspect was lacking from the Neanderthal mind in connection with toolmaking and interaction with the natural world, although it was present with regard to their thoughts about the social world."

(p. 148) "When Early Humans engaged in their toolmaking and foraging they may well have experienced... 'rolling consciousness' [momentary consciousness with swift memory loss]. It resulted from the heavy 'muffling' of consciousness when it is 'heard' from outside the chapel of social intelligence. In other words, when the mental modules that create consciousness were applied in domains different from those they had evolved to serve, they could not work effectively. This left Neanderthals with a rolling, fleeting, ephemeral consciousness about their own knowledge and thoughts concerning toolmaking and foraging. There was no introspection."

(p. 150) "At the heart of Nicholas Humphrey's ideas about the evolution of consciousness is the notion that it enables us to use our own minds as a model for the minds of other people. Thinking that other people think in the same way as us appears to have been of immense evolutionary value. But the corollary of this is that we find it inherently difficult to think that another human (of whatever species) thinks in a manner that is fundamentally different from our own."

"We are perhaps not in quite as bad a position as was the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he famously asked, writing in 1974, 'what is it like to be a bat?' We are, after all, much closer in evolutionary terms to Neanderthals than to bats. Nagel didn't want to know what it would be like for him to be a bat, but what it is like for a bat to be a bat. 'If I try to imagine this,' he wrote, 'I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.'"

"All we can ever achieve then is perhaps a fleeting experience of how a Neanderthal may once have thought as we for example concentrate on some task and block out the rest of the world from our minds. But this experience lasts no more than an instant. As with Nagel and his bats, we are unable to know what it was like for a Neanderthal to have been a Neanderthal. Evolution has guarded against this possibility and we are left struggling with the idea of a Swiss-army-knife mentality for Early Humans."

RESPONSE: And, as indicated in discussions of Human Beings As the Ultimate Reference System I have tried to make it clear that our tendency to think that since there is only one universe every creature must experience it in the same way causes us to come to this issue poorly prepared to understand it.

(p. 151) "There was a cultural explosion in the fourth and final act of our past. This happened in the time period 60,000 - 30,000 years ago, which marks the blurred start of the second scene of Act 4. The start of the act itself is marked by the entry of the final, and sole surviving, actor, H. sapiens sapiens at 100,000 years ago. This new actor appears immediately to have adopted certain forms of behavior never previously seen in the play. Most notable are the making of bone artifacts in southern Africa, and the placing of parts of animals in human burials in the Near East -- the only two areas of the world where 100,000-year-old H. sapiens sapiens fossils are known. But other than these glimpses of something new, the props of H. sapiens sapiens in the first scene of Act 4 are almost identical to those of the Early Humans. I will therefore refer to these first H. sapiens sapiens as Early Modern Humans. The cultural explosion only occurs after they have been on the stage for at least 40,000 years. And consequently it is the start of Scene 2, and not the first appearance of H. sapiens sapiens, which archaeologists denote as one of the major turning points in prehistory, referring to it in an ungainly phrase as the 'Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition.'"

"In this chapter I want to look at the behavior of H. sapiens sapiens in the first two scenes of Act 4 -- immediately before and after this transition -- and ask how their minds were different from those of Early Humans. But I want to take the two scenes in reverse order, beginning with the dramatic cultural changes which happened after 60,000 years ago, notably the origin of art."

"Now recall that by the start of Act 4 the cathedral of the modern mind is almost complete. The four chapels of technical, natural history, social, and linguistic intelligence, the traces of which we saw when we looked at the modern mind in Chapter 3, are in place. But the walls of these chapels are solid; the chapels are closed to each other, trapping within them the thoughts and knowledge of each specialized intelligence -- except for the flows between the chapels of linguistic and social intelligence. To constitute the modern mind, the thoughts and knowledge located in all these chapels must be allowed to flow freely around the cathedral -- or perhaps within one 'superchapel' -- harmonizing with each other to create ways of thought that could never have existed within one chapel."

(p. 152) "It is quite easy to think of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition as a cultural explosion, or a big bang -- the origins of the universe of human culture.... Yet if we look a little more closely at the boundary between Scene 1 and 2 we see that there is not so much a single big bang as a whole series of cultural sparks that occur at slightly different times in different parts of the world between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. The colonization of Australia, for instance, seems to reflect a cultural spark which happened between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago, yet at this time all remained relatively quiet elsewhere in the world. In the Near East a cultural spark happened between 50,000 and 45,000 years ago when the Levallois technology was replaced by that of blade cores. The cultural spark in Europe seems not to have been until 40,000 years ago with the appearance of the first objects of art. Indeed, it is perhaps only after 30,000 years ago that we can be confident that the hectic pace of cultural change had begun in earnest throughout the globe."

"As with the majority of archaeologists I believe something fundamental occurs at the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition, even if at slightly different times in different parts of the world. There have been several ideas previously put forward as to what this fundamental thing might be. These include notions about the 're-structuring of social relations,' the appearance of economic specialization, a technological 'invention' similar to that which caused the transition to agriculture 30,000 years later, and the origin of language. I think that these are all wrong: either they are merely consequences rather than causes of the transition, or they fail to recognize the complexity of social and economic life of the Early Humans."

RESPONSE: And I would say that all of these things are intimately tied together. Mithen has convinced me that the joining of separate modules in the mind of our forebearers has much to support it and I'm willing to accept it as a working hypothesis. But this does not remove modern language as a key element of this cultural explosion. Only after this mind meld happened could language play the role we are used to seeing.

But language is the effect that became the cause of what it means to be a human being. The integration of the mind was essential and undoubtedly language helped that to happen. But language then became the tool that is moving us toward the light at the end of the tunnel when we will no longer be driven by our "tribal" propensities but by our "wisdom" potenital of which language is a key element.

(p. 153) "My explanation of the big bang of human culture is that this is when the final major re-design of the mind took place. It is when the doors and windows were inserted in the chapel walls, or perhaps when a new 'superchapel' was constructed.... With these new design features the specialized intelligences of the Early Human mind no longer had to work in isolation. Indeed I believe that during the last two decades of research the explanation for the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition has been found -- not by archaeologists but by the cognitive scientists whose work we examined in Chapter 3."

"Recall how Jerry Fodor finds the 'passion for the analogical' to be a central feature of the distinctly non-modular central processes of the mind and how Howard Gardner believes that in the modern mind multiple intelligences function 'together smoothly, even seamlessly in order to execute complex human activities.' We saw how Paul Rozin concluded that 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' and Dan Sperber had reached a similar idea with his notion of a metarepresentational module, the evolution of which would create no less than a 'cultural explosion.' Also recall the ideas of Annette Karmiloff-Smith regarding how the human mind 're-represents knowledge,' so that 'knowledge thereby becomes applicable beyond the special-purpose goals for which it is normally used and representational links across different domains can be forged,' which is so similar to the notion of 'mapping across knowledge systems' as proposed by Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, and the ideas of Margaret Boden regarding how creativity arises from the 'transformation of conceptual spaces.'

(p. 154) "None of these cognitive scientists was writing about the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition. Nor were they necessarily writing about the same aspects of the modern mind: some were addressing child development while others were discussing cognitive evolution, or simply how we think as we go about our daily lives. But their ideas share a common theme: that in both development and evolution the human mind undergoes (or has undergone) a transformation from being constituted by a series of relatively independent cognitive domains to one in which ideas, ways of thinking and knowledge flow freely between such domains. Although they did not know it, Gardner, Rozin, Boden and the others were providing the answer to the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition."

"We cannot discuss the origin of art unless we agree what we are talking about. Art is another of those words pervading this book which defy easy definition, words like mind, language, and intelligence. As with those words, the definition of art is culturally specific. Indeed many societies who create splendid rock paintings do not have a word for art in their language. The communities of the Upper Paleolithic are likely to have had a very different concept of art (if one at all) from that which is the most popular today: non-utilitarian objects to be placed on pedestals in galleries. Yet these prehistoric hunter-gatherers were producing artifacts which we regard as priceless today, and which are very readily placed on pedestals in our own galleries and museums. Let us for a moment consider the earliest pieces of art known to us, before generalizing about their essential qualities."

(p. 155) "Membership of the elite group of artifacts that we call 'art' must go to those which are either representational or provide evidence for being part of a symbolic code, such as by the repetition of the same motifs. The earliest phase of the Upper Paleolithic provides us with examples of both."

"In terms of representational art we can do no better than start with the ivory statuette from Hohlenstein-Stadel in southern Germany, some 30,000 - 33,000 years old. This is a figure of a man with a lion's head carved from the tusk of a mammoth, a remarkable combination of technical expertise and powerful imagery."

"Contemporary with this representational art, we find images which appear to be part of a symbolic code being created in southwest France. These are predominantly 'V'-shaped signs engraved onto limestone blocks in the caves of the Dordogne.... The critical feature is that the motifs which have the same form are repeatedly engraved."

(p. 156) "Along with these pieces of art, the period between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago saw the first production of items for personal decoration such as beads, pendants, and perforated animal teeth.... At the same time as, or soon after, these items were being produced the first caves in southwest Europe were being painted with images of animals, signs and anthropomorphic figures.... Although this is the very first art known to humankind, there is nothing primitive about it."

"While the production of art was most prolific in Europe, it was a worldwide phenomenon by, or soon after, 30,000 years ago."

(p. 157) "The archaeological record shows us that Stone Age art is not a product of comfortable circumstances -- when people have time on their hands; it was most often created when people were living in conditions of severe stress.... Yet there is unlikely to have been a human population living under more adaptive stress than the Neanderthals of Western Europe. But they produced no art. They lacked the capacity to do so."

"We now know that even the simplest of images, such as a circle, can have many different referents.... for example, a circle can represent an almost unlimited number of referents: campsites, fires, mountains, waterholes, women's breasts, eggs, fruit, and other items."

"Naturalistic images, perhaps of animals or ancestral being, can also have complex and multiple meanings."

(p. 159) "Having considered some of the properties of visual symbols, let us consider what mental attributes are involved in creating and reading them.

There are at least three:

1. The making of a visual image involves the planning and execution of a preconceived mental template.

2. Intentional communication with reference to some displaced event or object.

3. The attribution of meaning to a visual image not associated with its referent."

"This can indeed be found -- in the domain of technical intelligence.... The cognitive processes located in the domain of technical intelligence used for making stone artifacts appear to have been sufficient to produce a figurine from an ivory tusk. But they were not used for such ends."

(p. 161) "With regard to the second of the three critical cognitive capacities for art, intentional communication, this was established in the previous chapter as a critical feature of Early Human social intelligence.... There can be little doubt that not only Early Humans, but also the common ancestor and the earliest Homo were engaging in frequent, intentional communication."

"The third element of a capacity for art is an ability to attribute meaning to inanimate objects or marks displaced from their referents. Can this ability be found within one of the cognitive domains of Early Humans? It certainly can: the capacity to attribute meaning to the unintentionally made tracks and trails of potential prey is a critical component of natural history intelligence."

"The three cognitive processes critical to making art -- mental conception of an image, intentional communication, and the attribution of meaning -- were all present in the Early Human mind. They were found in the domains of technical, social, and natural history intelligence respectively. But the creation and use of visual symbols requires that they function 'seamlessly and smoothly together' (to quote Gardner). This would require 'links across domains' (to quote Karmiloff-Smith). And the result would be a 'cultural explosion' (to quote Sperber)."

"We do see a cultural explosion beginning 40,000 years ago in Europe as the first works of art were produced and I would suggest that can be explained by new connections between the domains of technical, social, and natural history intelligence. The three previously isolated cognitive processes were now functioning together, creating the new cognitive process which we call visual symbolism, or simply art."

(p. 165) "Anthropomorphic thinking is something that pervades our own everyday lives. We indulge in anthropomorphic thinking in our relations with pets by attributing to them feelings, purposes and intentions. This may indeed be reasonable with regard to dogs and cats, but with a moment's reflection it seems far-fetched with regard to pets such as goldfish. We seem unable to help anthropomorphizing animals -- some claim that it is build into us by both nature and nurture -- and while this gives us considerable pleasure, it is a problem that plagues the study of animal behavior, for it is unlikely that animals really do have human-like minds. Anthropomorphism is a seamless integration between social and natural history intelligence. The very first pieces of Paleolithic art indicate that it stretches back to the cultural explosion of 40,000 years ago. But I doubt if it goes back any further."

"Totemism is the other side of the human/animal coin. Rather than attributing animals with human characteristics, it involves embedding human individuals and groups within the natural world, epitomized by tracing descent from a non-human species."

RESPONSE: Of course the foregoing is discussing descent through mystical transformations, not evolution.

(p. 167) "The hunter-gatherers of the Upper Paleolithic were hunting the same types of animals as the Early Humans. In Europe, for instance, reindeer, red deer, bison and horse continued as the mainstay of their economies, while in southern Africa animals such as eland, cape buffalo, and seals remained the most important prey. What differed, however, is the manner in which these animals were hunted. Modern humans appear to have been considerably more proficient at predicting game movements and planning complex hunting strategies."

(p. 168) "In general, the Modern Humans of the Upper Paleolithic appear to have had a significantly greater ability both to predict the movements of animals and to use that knowledge in their hunting strategies. How were they managing to do this? The answer lies in what has already been a major theme of this chapter: anthropomorphic thinking. This is universal among all modern hunters and its significance is that it can substantially improve prediction of an animal's behavior. Even though a deer or a horse may not think about its foraging and mobility patterns in the same way as Modern Humans, imagining that it does can act as an excellent predictor for where the animal will feed and the direction in which it may move."

(p. 169) "Anthropomorphic thinking, therefore, has clear utilitarian benefits. Yet the new powers of prediction would have been of limited value had Modern Humans not also been able to develop new types of hunting weapons. And we do indeed see a striking elaboration of technology at the start of the Upper Paleolithic."

"It is not simply the introduction of new tools at the start of the Upper Paleolithic which is important. It is how these were then constantly modified and changed.... Such behavior, geared to maintaining if not maximizing hunting efficiency, is markedly different from the monotony of the hunting tools of Early Humans during the equally variable environments that they exploited. It could only have arisen owing to a new connection between natural history and technical intelligence."

(p. 174) "Many of the new behaviors I have been describing, such as the anthropomorphic images in the cave paintings and the burial of people with grave goods, suggest that these Upper Paleolithic people were the first to have beliefs in supernatural beings and possibly an after life. We are indeed seeing here the first appearance of religious ideologies. This can be explained by the collapse of the barriers that had existed between the multiple intelligences of the Early Human mind."

"Just as we did with art, we must first reach some agreement on quite what we mean by the notion of religion. While it is difficult to identify features universal to all religions, there are nevertheless a series of recurrent ideas. The importance of these has been stressed by the social anthropologist Pascal Boyer in his 1994 book THE NATURALNESS OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. Boyer explains that a belief in non-physical beings is the most common feature of religions; it may indeed be universal. In fact, ever since the classic work of E.B. Tylor in 1871 on PRIMITIVE CULTURES, the idea of non-physical beings has been taken for the very definition of religion itself. Boyer notes three other recurrent features of religious ideologies. The first is that in many societies it is assumed that a non-physical component of a person can survive after death and remain as a being with beliefs and desires. Second, it is very frequently assumed that certain people within a society are especially likely to receive direct inspiration or messages from supernatural agencies, such as gods or spirits. And third, it is also very widely assumed that performing certain rituals in an exact way can bring about change in the natural world."

RESPONSE: Of course what Mithen says above is true of folk religions. And in that context is ok. However, if we truly want to understand religion -- what it is and what it's for -- in a scientific way these do not take us very far because they focus on the magic rather than the physiological processes beneath the magic.

From the perspective of a Science of Religion it is quite simple to identify what is universal about all religions, and this is of course the dimension that is totally overlooked by science (sociology, anthropolgy, psychology, etc.). All religions provide a way for their members to believe that their life has meaning. Although they all do this by utilizing their member's "tribal" propensity to believe in magic and the power of wishing they have all been successful in maintaining the lives of their members and usually within a functioning society that permits the society as a whole to move toward helping humanity achieve its "wisdom" potential.

(p. 178) "The new cognitive fluidity transformed the human mind and all aspects of human behavior. It is not surprising that with new abilities to use materials such as bone and ivory for tools, and to use artifacts to store and transmit information, humans were able to colonize new areas of the world. At around 60,000 years ago a second major pulse of movement across the globe began, following that of the first Early Humans to leave Africa more than 1.5 million years ago. As Clive Gamble has described in his recent study of global colonization, Australasia was colonized by extensive sea voyages, and then the North European Plain, the arid regions of Africa and the coniferous forests and tundra of the far north were colonized soon after 40,000 years ago. Early Humans may have temporarily entered these environments, but they did not remain on a long-term basis. Modern Humans not only colonized them but used them as stepping stones to the Americas and the Pacific islands."

"The emergence of a cognitively fluid mentality provides the answer to the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition. But remember that this transition does not happen until half-way through Act 4. The start of that act is defined by the appearance of H. sapiens sapiens in the fossil record at 100,000 years ago. We must complete this chapter by asking how the minds of these Early Modern Humans -- those who lived before the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition -- were different from those of the Early Humans of Act 3 (who also continued into the first scene of Act 4), and the Modern Humans who lived after the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition, among whom we must include ourselves."

"There is, I believe a simple answer to this question. The Early Modern Humans seem to have been achieving some degree of integration between their specialized intelligences, but not gaining the full cognitive fluidity that arose after 60,000 years ago. Their minds were a half-way house between a Swiss-army-knife and a cognitively fluid mentality."

(p. 183) "If we are indeed dealing with a single type of human in southern Africa after 100,000 years ago, then the mentality of the Early Modern Humans appears to drift in and out of cognitive fluidity. It is as if the benefits of partial cognitive fluidity were not sufficient for this mental transformation to have been 'fixed' within the population. The minds of these Early Modern Humans seem like those of the Early Modern Humans of the Near East in showing some degree of cognitive fluidity, but one that did not match what arose after the start of the Upper Paleolithic."

RESPONSE: My own guess is that this was related to the development of modern language. The full integration of all the components of mind could not take place until modern language was perfected. As the development of grammer and syntax went through a back and forth process as it worked toward mastery, human mentality would drift in and out of cognitive fluidity.

(p. 183) "Nevertheless, this partial cognitive fluidity was to prove absolutely critical in giving Early Modern Humans the competitive edge as they spread from Africa and the Near East throughout the world between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago. The Early Modern Humans of the Near East are likely to be representatives of -- or at least closely related to -- the source population of H. sapiens sapiens that left Africa, spread into Asia and Europe and replaced all existing Early Humans."

"The strongest evidence for this replacement scenario is the limited amount of genetic diversity among living humans today. Although there is considerable controversy as to how modern genetic variability should be interpreted, there is strong evidence that there has been a recent and severe 'bottleneck' in human evolution. In general, living Africans have a higher degree of genetic variability than people elsewhere in the world, suggesting that as the first H. sapiens sapiens left Africa there was a considerable loss of genetic variation. This implies that for a short period of time there was a very small breeding population. One recent estimate has suggested no more than six breeding individuals for 70 years, which would reflect an actual population size of around 50 individuals, or 500 individuals if this bottleneck lasted for 200 years."

RESPONSE: It seems to me that this might be the key to Modern Human development. Puncuated evolution might explain how the changes came about to get from a super-smart Homo sapiens sapiens (Early Modern Humans) to Modern Humans with a language ability comparable to our own.

Understanding how modern language developed is a very big problem. Mithem brings together overwhelming evidence that language can be traced back for over two million years. But what this language looked like is another question. Modern language is not a matter of straight line evolution.

As Clarence Deacon makes clear in THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES it seems that one has to have language before language can develop with grammer, syntex, etc. imposed on spoken communication. It seems to me that this step could only happen in a small breeding population teetering on the brink of achieving this behavior. There would need to be tremendous reproductive pressures imposed on it to select out any but the most advanced carriers of these traits.

If a small group of 30 - 50 individuals became isolated in some area due to interglacial weather changes for enough time with the right ingredients present this might lead to the final changes evolving that created a simple language (with grammer and syntex) out of which modern language evolved.

This small group with its superior advantage could then have spread over the surface of the rest of the earth including return to Africa to interbreed with and pass on this gene/gene complex and accompanying cultural patterns to existing Homo sapiens sapiens groups.

(p. 184) "At slightly different times in different parts of the world the final step to a cognitively fluid mind was taken. This was the integration of technical intelligence with the already combined social and natural history intelligences. That all H. sapiens sapiens populations dispersed throughout the world took this final step -- a case of parallel evolution -- was perhaps inevitable. There was an evolutionary momentum to cognitive fluidity; once the process had begun it could not be halted. It appears that as soon as a set of adaptive pressures arose in each area, technical intelligence became part of the cognitively fluid mind, the final step on the path to modernity."

RESPONSE: I don't believe in parallel evolution within Homo sapiens sapiens. We're talking about members of one breeding population. We have a deep interest in new sexual partners. A young stud who could talk about all areas of intelligence would be admired by all and could find many willing sexual partners. In addition our species has an inherent geographical restlessness. We get around. I think what has happened since 1400 CE is only a speeded up version of what has been happening for the past 100,000 years. I think any helpful mutations that have occurred over that period of time have been spread around to all populations so we pretty well share one common gene pool because of genetic intermingling not parallel evoluton. Movement such as the foregoing would explain the time differences in the display of these new traits over the face of the earth.

(p. 185) "I have concluded that the diverse range of new behaviors that appear in Act 4 of the play derive from a fundamental change in mental architecture. Thoughts and knowledge which has been previously trapped within chapels of specialized intelligence could now flow freely around the cathedral of the mind -- or at least a part of it -- harmonizing with each other to create new types of thoughts as part of an almost limitless imagination: a cognitively fluid mentality."

RESPONSE: Mithen has convinced me that he has assembled a giant piece of the puzzle for human history. But, I think his explanations have grossly underestimated the role of language. Based on Deacon's monumental efforts I still believe that language is the key element in Modern Human development and cognitive fluidy is the explanation for how this language was able to reach its current power and breadth.

(p. 185) "My argument remains incomplete, because I have yet to explain how the new cognitive fluidity arose. I believe the explanation relates to changes in the nature of language and consciousness within the mind. Let me start my explanation with a simple proposition: once Early Humans started talking, they just couldn't stop."

"To understand how this led to cognitive fluidity we must first recall that in previous chapters I have followed the proposals of Robin Dunbar that the language of Early Humans was a 'social language' -- they used language as a means to send and receive social information. This contrasts with our language today which is a general-purpose language, playing a critical role in the transmission of information about the non-social world, although a social bias remains. Now although the language of Early Humans can be characterized as a social language -- and for the Early Humans after 250,000 years ago, as a language with an extensive lexicon and grammatical complexity -- I believe there would nevertheless have been 'snippets' of language about the non-social world, such as about animal behavior and toolmaking."

"These would have arisen from two sources. The first is general intelligence. As I [have] argued... general intelligence was extremely important in the Early Human mind as it conditioned behavior at the domain interfaces, such as the use of tools for hunting and use of food for establishing social relationships. As a result, behavior at these domain interfaces remained extremely simple, because general intelligence could not access the cognitive processes located within each of the specialized intelligences. General intelligence is also likely to have enabled Early Humans to associate particular vocalizations with non-social entities and consequently produced 'snippets of conversation' about the non-social world -- which would have been few in number and lacking in grammatical complexity. Indeed these snippets are likely to have been similar in complexity to the use of symbols by chimpanzees when trained in laboratories which, as I [have] argued... arises simply from possessing a general intelligence, rather than any linguistic capacity. The non-social 'language' of Early Humans may thus have amounted to a small range of 'words,' used predominantly as demands, and with no more than two or three being strung together in a single utterance. They would have contrasted with the grammatically complex and diverse flow of utterances relating to the social world produced by Early Humans arising from their specialized social and linguistic intelligences. Yet the non-social vocalizations may have been embedded within this social language."

(p. 187) "Further selective advantage would have been attained by those individuals who could add more non-social linguistic snippets into conversation, such as by introducing questions about animal behavior or toolmaking methods. Perhaps these were individuals who, due to random changes made in the architectural plans they inherited, had particularly permeable walls between their specialized intelligences. These talkative individuals were gaining their selective advantage by exploiting the non-social knowledge of other individuals by using language, as opposed to relying on behavioral observations alone. As a consequence, social language would very rapidly (in evolutionary time) have moved to a general-purpose language; my guess would be in the time period between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago. Natural selection, the most important architect of the mind, simply would not have allowed this opportunity to improve the exchange of non-social information, and hence increase reproductive success, to pass by."

RESPONSE: This time frame sounds right if one recognizes that the really dramatic changes would have come right at the end.

(p. 190) "A critical feature of the change to a cognitively fluid mind was a change in the nature of consciousness. Throughout this book I have followed Nicholas Humphrey's argument that (reflexive) consciousness evolved as a critical feature of social intelligence: it enabled our ancestors to predict the behavior of other individuals. But just like any other micro-domain of social intelligence, consciousness was not accessible to thought in other cognitive domains -- there is no reason to expect Early Humans to have had an awareness about their own knowledge and thought processes concerning the non-social world (other than the ephemeral rolling consciousness I described in Chapter 8). But if, via the mechanism of language, social intelligence starts being invaded by non-social information, the non-social world becomes available for reflexive consciousness to explore. This is, in essence, the argument that Paul Rozin made in 1976 regarding the evolution of advanced intelligence. The critical feature of his notion of accessibility was the 'bringing to consciousness' of the knowledge which was already in the human mind but located within the 'cognitive unconsciousness.'"

(p. 191) "The new role for consciousness in the human mind is likely to have been the one identified by the psychologist Daniel Schacter. In an article written in 1989 he argued that, in addition to creating the subjective feelings of 'knowing,' 'remembering,' and 'perceiving;' consciousness should be viewed as 'a global database that integrates the output of modular processes.' He goes on to argue that such an 'integrative mechanism is crucial in any modular system in which processing and representations of different types of information are handled in parallel by separate modules.' In the Early Human mind, general intelligence was the only device available to play this integrating role, and it hardly played it at all. But because language acted as the vehicle for delivering non-social thoughts and knowledge into the chapel of social intelligence, consciousness could start to play this new integrating role within the cathedral of the mind."

"Early Humans did not lack consciousness altogether; it was simply restricted within their domain of social intelligence. And consequently their social interactions showed considerable flexibility, sensitivity and creativity. But this was markedly absent from their non-social activity -- as anyone who has had the task of describing handaxe, after handaxe, after handaxe will know. But as soon as language started acting as the vehicle for delivering non-social information and ideas into the domain of social intelligence, reflexive consciousness could also get to grips with the non-social world. Individuals could now become introspective about their non-social thought processes and knowledge. As a result, the whole of human behavior was pervaded with the flexibility and creativity that is characteristic of Modern Humans."

(p. 192) "The scenario I have offered for the evolution of cognitive fluidity suggests that by 150,000 years ago the Swiss-army-knife mentality was beginning to break down. Those individuals who were able to exploit snippets of non-social conversation were at a selective advantage as they could integrate knowledge which has been 'trapped' within specialized intelligences. We can, I think, identify one particular class of individual within these societies who would have been under particular selective pressure to achieve cognitive fluidity: sexually mature females."

RESPONSE: I take this to mean tht those without it had fewer offspring who lived to reproduce.

(p. 192) "Females at any time during human evolution were only able to give birth to relatively small-brained infants. This is due to the anatomy of the pelvis which needs to be narrow to allow efficient walking on two legs. Consequently the offspring of Modern Humans have a brain size no larger than that of a newborn chimpanzee -- about 350 cc. Yet unlike the chimpanzee, in the immediate period after birth the human brain continues to grow at the same rate as that of a fetus. By the age of four a human brain has tripled in size, and when maturity is reached it is around 1400 cc, four times the size at birth. In contrast the chimpanzee brain has only a small postnatal increase in size to around 450 cc. During the period of brain growth after birth, human infants have a very high degree of dependency on adults. There are substantial demands on the mothers to supply the energy to fuel the growth of the infant brain, and indeed anatomy in general. These demands would have become particularly strong during the second period of rapid brain expansion that began after 500,000 years ago."

"The social anthropologist Chris Knight and his colleagues have argued that the Early Modern Human females solved the problem of how to 'fuel' the production of increasingly large-brained infants by extracting 'unprecedented levels of male energetic investment.'"

(p. 194) "Let me conclude this chapter by summarizing my explanation for the evolution of cognitive fluidity. The seeds were sown with the increase of brain size that began 500,000 years ago. This was related to the evolution of a grammatically complex social language. The utterances of this language, however, carried snippets of non-social information as well. Those individuals who were able to exploit such non-social information gained a reproductive advantage. In particular, females who were nursing infants for prolonged periods -- and therefore unable to feed themselves adequately -- would have come under selective pressure to adapt in this way, because their patterns of social interaction with males had become bound up with a need for food. As social language switched to a general-purpose language, individuals acquired an increasing awareness about their own knowledge of the non-social world. Consciousness adopted the role of an integrating mechanism for knowledge that had previously been 'trapped' in separate specialized intelligences."

RESPONSE: But all of this should have happened after 500,000 years ago. Perhaps, the symbolic nature of language had driven some brain expansion to handle this more smoothly and well.

(p. 194) "The first step towards cognitive fluidity appears to have been an integration between social and natural history intelligence that is apparent from the Early Modern Humans of the Near East, 100,000 years ago. This is before Modern Humans dispersed into Asia and Europe where they either replaced or interbred with existing Early Human populations. The final step to a full cognitive fluidity occurred at slightly different times in different populations between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. This involved an integration of technical intelligence, and led to the changes in behavior that we refer to as the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition. In other words, it created a cultural explosion: the appearance of the modern mind."

(p. 195) "The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover... the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity. So too can the rise of agriculture... for agriculture and its consequences do indeed constitute the cultural epilogue to the evolution of the mind.

RESPONSE: As indicated I think Mithen has the order of language reversed. I believe that Mithen is right that cognitive fluidity occurred some 100,000 - 150,000 years ago with the joining of social and natural history intelligence and that the simple language available at that time made this possible. However, this simple language would have been a somewhat dull instrument which required much sharpening before it reached its full potential.

It is my guess that grammer only became possible with the integration of technical intelligence which provided the linear structure that made such language possible. With this advance language was poised to evolve and reach a critical point (between 60,000 to 30,000 years ago).

(p. 195) "The switch from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago was a remarkable 'about turn' for evolution to have taken. The previous 6 million years of evolution had seen an ever-increasing specialization of the mind. Natural history, technical, and then linguistic intelligence has been added to the social intelligence that was already present in the mind of the common ancestor to living apes and humans. But what is even more remarkable is that this recent switch from specialized to generalized ways of thinking was not the only 'about turn' that occurred during the evolution of the modern mind. If we chart the evolution of the mind not just over the mere 6 million years of this prehistory, but over the 65 million years of primate evolution, we can see that there has been an oscillation between specialized and generalized ways of thinking."

"In this final chapter I want to put the modern mind in its truly long-term context by charting and explaining this long-term oscillation in the nature of the mind. Only by doing so can we appreciate how we are products of a long, slow gradual process of evolution and how we differ so much from our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. And in doing so I want firmly to embed the evolution of the mind into that of the brain, and indeed the body in general."

"We must start 65 million yeas ago with a creature known as Purgatorius.... a mouse-sized creature which lived on insects."

(p. 197) "Our concern is with the type of mind that should be attributed to these creatures. It would seem appropriate to characterize their pattern of behavior as more directly under the control of genetic mechanisms than of learning."

(p. 200) "To put it in other words, they possessed a type of Swiss-army-knife mentality."

"The plesiadapiforms declined in abundance around 50 million years ago. This coincided with a proliferation of rodents, which probably out-competed the plesiadapiforms for leaves and fruit. However, by around 56 million years ago two new primate groups had appeared, referred to as the omomyids and the adapids. These are the first 'modern primates' and looked similar to the lemurs, lorises and the tarsier of today. These first modern primates were agile tree dwellers, specialized for eating fruit and leaves. The best preserved is Notharctus, whose fossil remains come from North America."

"The most notable feature of these early primates is that they were the first to possess a relatively large brain.... The evolution of this particularly large brain size is described as the process of encephalization -- and we can see that it began with these early primates of 56 million years ago."

(p. 201) "It is at this date, therefore, of about 56 million years ago, that we have the first 'about turn' in the evolution of the mind. We can see a switch from a specialized type of mentality possessed by archaic primates, with behavioral responses to stimuli largely hard-wired into the brain, to a generalized type of mentality in which cognitive mechanisms allow learning from experience. Evolution appears to have exhausted the possibilities for increasing hard-wired behavioral routines: an alternative evolutionary path was begun based on generalized intelligence."

"General intelligence required a larger brain to allow the information processing required to make simple cost/benefit calculations when choosing between behavioral strategies, and to enable knowledge to be acquired by associative learning. For a larger brain to have evolved, these early modern primates would have needed to exploit high-quality plant foods such as new leaves, ripe fruits and flowers -- as is confirmed by their dental features."

(p. 202) "The next important group of primates comes from Africa, notably the sedimentary deposits of the Fayum depression in Egypt. The most important of these is Aegyptopithecus, which lived around 35 million years ago. This was a fruit-eating primate, living in the tall trees of monsoonal rainforests. Its body appears to have been adapted for both climbing and leaping. Like all the previous primates, it was a quadruped committed to moving on all four limbs. The most important primate fossils from the period 23-15 million years ago are likely to represent several species, but are referred to as Proconsul. These fossils are found in Kenya and Uganda, and show both monkey-like and ape-like features."

"The mind of Aegyptopithecus, probably differed from that of Notharctus and the other early modern primates in two major respects. First the domain of general intelligence became more powerful -- giving greater information processing power. The second change is of more significance: the evolution of a specialized domain of social intelligence."

(p. 203) "It is during this period that Andrew Whiten's characterization of brain evolution as deriving from a 'spiraling pressure as clever individuals relentlessly selected for yet more cleverness in their companions' is appropriate."

"This 'spiraling pressure' probably continued in the period between 15 and 4.5 million years ago, during which the fossil record is particularly sparse. It was in this time period, at around 6 million years ago, that the common ancestor of modern apes and humans lived...."

"When the fossil record improves after 4.5 million years ago, the australopithecines are established in East Africa and possibly elsewhere in that continent.... [T]he best preserved of these, Australopithicus afarensis, displays adaptations for a joint arboreal and terrestrial lifestyle.... [T]he fossils between 3.5 and 2.5 million years ago suggest that this was a period of stability with regard to brain size. Why should the 'spiraling pressure' for ever greater social intelligence, and consequently brain expansion, have come to an end -- or at least a hiatus? The probable answer is that evolution now confronted two severe constraints: bigger brains need more fuel, and bigger brains need to be keep cool."

"The australopithecines are likely to have been mainly vegetarian and lived in the equatorial, wooded savannahs. This lifestyle constrained the amount of energy that could be supplied to the brain, and exposed them to constant risk of overheating. Brain expansion could therefore not have occurred...."

(p. 204) "Had it not been for a remarkable conjunction of circumstances, it is likely that australopithecines would still be foraging in Africa and that the Homo lineage would not have evolved. But...at around 2 million years ago there started a very rapid period of brain expansion, marking the appearance of the Homo lineage. This could only have arisen if the constraints on brain expansion had been relaxed -- and of course if selective pressures were present. When trying to explain how this happened, the interrelationships between the evolution of the mind, the brain and the body become of paramount importance. There are two behavioral developments in this period which are of critical importance: bipedalism -- habitual walking on two legs -- and increased meat eating."

(p. 206) "In my reconstruction of the evolution of the mind I only found the first evidence for distinct domains of natural history and technical intelligence at 1.8 - 1.4 millions years ago with the appearance of H. erectus, and the technically demanding handaxes. What were the causes, conditions and consequences for these new domains of intelligence?"

(p. 206-207) "The ultimate cause for these new specialized intelligences was the continuing competition between individuals -- the cognitive arms race that had been unleashed when the constraints on brain enlargement had been relaxed.... So, just as the possibilities of increasing reproductive success by enhancing general intelligence alone by natural selection had been exhausted by 35 million years ago, we might also conclude that the 'path of least resistance' for a further evolution of the mind in the conditions existing at 2 million years ago lay not in enhanced social intelligence but in the evolution of new cognitive domains: natural history and technical intelligence."

(p. 207) "The most significant behavioral consequence of these new cognitive domains was the colonization of large parts of the Old World. The evolution of a natural history and technical intelligence thus opened up a further window of opportunity for human behavior. Within less than 1.5 million years, our recent relatives were living as far apart as Pontnewydd Cave in north Wales, the Cape of South Africa and the tip of Southeast Asia. There could be no more effective demonstration that the Swiss-army-knife mentality of Early Humans provided a remarkably effective adaptation to the Pleistocene world. Indeed, there appears to have been no further brain enlargement and no significant changes in the nature of the mind between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago."

(p. 208) "The fourth cognitive domain to have evolved in the Early Human mind was that of language. It is likely that as far back as 2 million years ago, selective pressures existed for enhanced vocalizations. In this book I have followed Robin Dunbar's and Leslie Aiello's argument that language initially evolved as a means of communicating social information alone rather than information about subjects such as tools or hunting. As group sizes enlarged, mainly due to the pressure of a terrestrial lifestyle, those individuals who could reduce the time they needed to spend in building social ties by grooming -- or who acquired greater amounts of social knowledge with the same time investment -- were reproductively more successful."

"Just as the tree-living ancestry of the australopithecines enabled bipedalism to evolve, so too did bipedalism itself make possible the evolution of an enhanced vocalization capacity among early Homo, and particularly H. erectus. This has been made clear by Leslie Aiello. She has explained how the upright posture of bipedalism resulted in the descent of the larynx, which lies much lower in the throat than in the apes. A spin off, not a cause, of the new position of the larynx was a greater capacity to form the sounds of vowels and consonants. In addition, changes in the pattern of breathing associated with bipedalism will have improved the quality of sound. Increased meat eating also had an important linguistic spin off, since the size of teeth could be reduced thanks to the greater ease of chewing meat and fat, rather than large quantities of dry plant material this reduction changed the geometry of the jaw, enabling muscles to develop which could make the fine movements of the tongue within the oral cavity necessary for the diverse and high-quality range of sounds required by language."

"The linguistic capacity was intimately connected with the domain of social intelligence within the Early Human mind. But technical and natural history intelligence remained isolated from these, and from each other."

"...[W]hile H. erectus probably possessed a capacity for vocalizing substantially more complex than what we see in apes today, it is likely to have remained relatively simple compared with human language. The evolution of the two principal defining features of language, a vast lexicon and a set of grammatical rules, seems to be related to the second spurt of brain enlargement that happened between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. Yet even with these elements present, it remained in essence a social language. Explanations for this second period of brain enlargement are less easy to propose than for the initial spurt, which is clearly related to the origin of bipedalism and a terrestrial lifestyle."

RESPONSE: Although Deacon doesn't attempt to lay down a blow-by-blow connection between brain and language and follow it over time, based on work such as his and Mithen's it might be possible to lay out such a step-by-step development as to what would have to happen in the brain to allow language to move from its Homo habilis level to its Modern Human level.

When this is done I would expect the brain enlargement of 500,000 - 200,000 years ago to pop out as an essential element of this development, particularly after considering what must have been happening within each of the other three modules of intelligence. Of course in reality we will, no doubt, need the back and forth of hypotheses about what it would take to advance the development of language one evolutionary step after another and the evidence as to what was in fact happening in the brain over this time to the degree that enough evidence is available to make useful inferences.

(p. 209) "One possibility is that the renewed brain enlargement relates to a further expansion of the size of social groups.... But the need for large group size is unclear.... Aiello and Dunbar suggest that it may simply reflect the increase in global human population and the need for defense not against carnivores, but other human groups."

RESPONSE: The above certainly makes sense to me.

"Yet here again another new window of opportunity arose for evolution. As soon as language acted as a vehicle for delivering information into the mind (whether one's own or that of another person), carrying with it snippets of non-social information, a transformation in the nature of the mind began.... Language switched from a social to general-purpose function, consciousness from a means to predict other individuals' behavior to managing a mental database of information relating to all domains of behavior. A cognitive fluidity arose within the mind, reflecting new connections rather than new processing power. And consequently this mental transformation occurred with no increase in brain size. It was, in essence, the origins of the symbolic capacity that is unique to the human mind with the manifold consequences for hunter-gatherer behavior...."

"...[O]ne of the strongest selective pressures for this cognitive fluidity is likely to have been the provisioning to females with food.... Consequently male provisioning is likely to have been essential, resulting in a need for connections between natural history and social intelligence."

(p. 210) "Cognitive fluidity enabled people to engage in new types of activities, such as art and religion. As soon as these arose the developmental contexts for young minds began to change. Children were born into a world where art and religious ideology already existed; in which tools were designed for specific tasks, and where all items of material culture were imbued with social information. At 10,000 years ago the developmental contexts began to change even more fundamentally with the origins of an agricultural way of life...."

"The hectic and ongoing pace of cultural evolution unleashed by the appearance of cognitive fluidity continues to change the developmental contexts of young minds, resulting in new types of domain-specific knowledge. But all minds develop a cognitive fluidity. This is the defining property of the modern mind."

"If we stand back from this 65 million years, we can see how the selective advantages during the evolution of the mind have oscillated from those individuals with specialized intelligence, in terms of hard-wired modules, up to 56 million yeas ago, to those with general intelligence up to 35 million years ago, and then back again to those with specialized intelligence in the form of cognitive domains up until 100,00 years ago. The final phase of cognitive evolution involved a further switch back to a generalized type of cognition represented by cognitive fluidity."

(p. 212) "Why did natural selection not simply build on general intelligence, gradually making it more complex and powerful?"

"The answer is that a switch between specialized and generalized systems is the only way for a complex phenomenon to arise, whether it is a jet engine, a computer program or the human mind."

(p. 213) "In this regard, natural selection was simply being a very good (though blind) programmer when building the complex modern mind. If it had tried to evolve the complex, generalized type of modern mind directly from the simple, generalized type of mind of our early ancestors, without developing each cognitive domain in an independent fashion, it would simply have failed."

(p. 215) "In summary, science like art and religion, is a product of cognitive fluidity. It relies on psychological processes which had originally evolved in specialized cognitive domains and only emerged when these processes could work together. Cognitive fluidity enabled technology to be developed which could solve problems and store information. Of perhaps even greater significance, it allowed the possibility for the use of powerful metaphors and analogy, without which science could not exist."

"Indeed, if one should want to specify those attributes of the modern mind that distinguish it not only from the minds of our closest living relatives, the apes, but also our much closer, but extinct, ancestors, it would be the use of metaphor and what Jerry Fodor described as our passion for analogy. Chimpanzees cannot use metaphor and analogy, because with one single type of specialized intelligence, they lack the mental resources for metaphor, not to mention the language with which to express it. Early Humans could not use metaphor because they lacked cognitive fluidity. But for Modern Humans, analogy and metaphor pervade every aspect of our thought and lie at the heart of art, religion, and science."

"I have found the use of metaphor and analogy in various guises to be the most significant feature of the human mind. I have myself only been able to think and write about prehistory and the mind by using two metaphors within this book: our past as a play and the mind as a cathedral."

RESPONSE: It is interesting that I have disliked Mithen's analogies (of the chapel naves and history as a play) and have done my best not to use them. Perhaps, this helps explain why most people don't want to read what I write. There are few analogies and metaphors. Although I have been aware of this deficiency for several years (since a friend suggested the importance of them) I have not been able to add them to my writing.

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

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