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Thinking About Thinking
HOWARD GARDNER
New York Review of Books
October 9, 1997
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The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art,
Religion and Science
by Steven Mithen
288 pages, $27.50 (hardcover)
published by Thames and Hudson
1.
Before Darwin, many scholars wrote about the origins of man and the beginnings
of mental life. Such writings, however, were frankly speculative: there were
few agreed-upon facts, nor was there a comprehensive theoretical frame within
which to situate facts and suppositions. Darwin's epoch-making writings changed
forever the status of human beings' reflections about themselves and their
minds. Darwin put forth the most plausible general account of the evolutionary
origins of contemporary forms of life--an account long accepted as correct
in its basic outlines. In addition, he stimulated students of biology and
human behavior to collect and interpret data relevant to the actual, as opposed
to the supposed, "prehistory" of mind and man.
What had been a trickle of writings about prehistoric life became a torrent
of publications in the half century following Darwin. Dozens of scholars conjectured
about the antecedents of contemporary man or described more primitive forms
of mental life in nonhuman animals. In nearly all cases, what emerged as the
peak of intellectual evolution bore a marked resemblance to the authors of
these books--European and North American scholars who, in a contemporary phrase,
were "stale, male, and pale." So much energy was devoted to the
often speculative search for mankind's intellectual "roots" that
in 1866 the Circle of Linguistics of Paris actually banned papers on the origins
of language, which of course did not stop them from being written.
While the temptation to publish grand theories about the prehistory of the
mind was never completely quelled, such work had fallen distinctly out of
favor by the middle years of this century. Most scholars agreed that there
were already too many accounts that could not be properly evaluated, among
them Freud's view that prehistoric social life originated in the consumption
by sons of their murdered father's corpse. It made more sense for scholars
to set themselves to less ambitious tasks, and to try to get at least part
of the "prehistory riddle" straight. They could investigate the
mental life of infants, or the development of early tools in East Africa,
or brain changes that might have facilitated the development of speech, or
the stunning images of animals found in the caves of southern Europe. Finally,
the pseudoscientific evolutionary and eugenic program advanced by the Nazis
gave a deservedly bad name to the practice of ranking individuals (or minds)
according to some metrical index of sophistication, complexity, or "full"
humanity.
Still, it is not possible--and probably not desirable--for scholars to desist
entirely from attempting to sketch a broad picture of human prehistory. Textbook
authors often attempt to do so, and important proposals about early development
have also come from philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer, who examined the
fundamental practices of art, myth, and religion as they might have first
emerged; brain scientists like Harry Jerrison, who charted the growth patterns
of the brain in different species; and archaeologists like Alexander Marshack,
who discerned early notational systems in the apparently haphazard scratches
on pieces of bone.
Other theories have been more controversial, while also having more popular
appeal. In the 1970s, for example, the psychologist Julian Jaynes created
a stir with his claim that human self-consciousness as we know it did not
develop until well into the classical era. In Jaynes's account, the Greeks
described in the Iliad heard voices that told them what to do, while
the Greeks portrayed in the Odyssey were capable of making their own
plans. Another controversial theory was proposed in the 1980s, when the historian
Riane Eisler concluded from a study of artifacts that early human societies
were primarily matriarchal, with power eventually being seized by the initially
subsidiary males.
In a complex and inevitably controversial field like "prehistory,"
works that successfully combine the scholarly and the popular are rare. In
recent years, the most impressive effort of this sort has been undertaken
by the Canadian neuropsychologist Merlin Donald. In his carefully reasoned
Origins of the Modern Mind, a book that draws explicitly on several
scholarly disciplines, Donald claims that the human line of descent in the
past two million years has passed through three major transitions. In the
first, which separated hominids from other apes, early humans became able
to use their bodies to imitate older and more sophisticated members of the
same group. In the second transition, humans developed distinctive neuronal
and anatomical systems that allowed them to use spoken language and to make
up and tell stories. In the third transition, which created modern man, humans
invented symbolic and notational systems that could eventually be used to
preserve memories and transmit complex forms of culture, including art and
science. Donald's account, necessarily a broad one, is considered by many
scholars as a plausible outline of human origins.
2.
The British archaeologist Steven Mithen states explicitly, "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."
One error that Donald made, in Mithen's view, was to give excessive attention
to psychological data. Mithen understandably looks to his own discipline of
archaeology when he declares, "If you wish to know about the mind, do
not ask only psychologists and philosophers: make sure you also ask an archaeologist."
And he sees this discipline--with himself as interpreter--as equal to the
task. "The human mind is," he confidently writes,
a product of evolution, not supernatural creation. I have laid
bare the evidence. I have specified the "whats," the "whens"
and the "whys" for the evolution of the mind. I have explained
how the potential arose in the mind to undertake science, create art and
believe in religious ideologies.
We are all familiar with some of the powerful metaphors, analogies, and images
that have been used in the sciences and social sciences: Darwin's tangled
bank of species, Freud's portrayal of the ego trying to control the id as
a rider perched on an unruly horse. Of course, metaphors can also mislead:
the kinds of experience that they purport to connect may prove incommensurate
in various ways. Clearly Mithen is smitten by the metaphoric bug, but he is
not always well served by this tendency toward epistemological romance.
To describe evolutionary processes, Mithen relies heavily on a set of evocative
images. The principal organizing metaphor of the book construes the history
of the mind as a four-act play. If the metaphor of a series of acts seems
banal, the play is a peculiar one, to say the least--a set of Beckett-like
lengthy silences, punctuated by a few bursts of Shakespearean energy.
Act One--covering the period 6 million to 4.5 million years ago--occurs in
Africa and involves only an ancestral ape. There may be a set of primitive
tools lying about, but otherwise the scenery is dark and nothing in the archeological
evidence suggests human intelligence is emerging. Act Two--spanning 4.5 million
to 1.8 million years ago--consists of two scenes. The first scene involves
Australopithecus--at first living in wooded environments, later walking
around more freely and climbing trees. The famous Lucy makes an appearance
here. The second scene, beginning about 2 million years ago, ushers in the
Homo lineage. Homo habilis possesses rough stone tools, which
he uses to extract meat from the corpses of dead animals.
The third act covers the period from 1.8 million (the start of the Pleistocene)
to 100,000 years ago. Homo erectus appears at several points around
the world. His brain is larger, and hand axes first appear--mankind's earliest
tool, which was first chipped from stone some 1.4 million years ago. The second
scene, called the Middle Paleolithic, commences 200,000 years ago. Pear-shaped
stone hand axes give way to tools that produce flakes, stone points, and other
more nuanced instruments. By about 150,000 BC, Homo neanderthalensis
appears, with his finely crafted tools of stone and, possibly, wood. Mithen
expresses his surprise that life at this late point in the prehistorical drama
remains tedious, with the same set of tools being used for narrow purposes
and with no hint in the archaeological evidence of art, science, or religion.
Act Four, commencing 100,000 years ago, Mithen describes as "a much shorter
act, into which are squeezed three scenes packed with more dramatic action
than in all the rest of the play." The star is Homo sapiens sapiens.
For the first time, we can see vestiges of practices that remind us of our
own concerns: the dead are regularly buried, some with objects that are placed
within burial sites; harpoons are made of bone; boats are built; dwellings
are erected; walls are painted; animals are carved; clothes are sewn with
bone needles; people decorate their bodies with beads and pendants. Finally,
in the third scene of the final act, people in the Near East plant crops,
domesticate animals, build towns and cities, create and use systems of notation.
After six million years of relative inaction, material events and mental activity
proliferate at such an explosive rate that it becomes difficult to order and
make sense of them.
When he comes to addressing the nature and workings of the human mind, Mithen
begins by discussing--and then rejecting--two metaphors that have wide appeal
but seem inadequate. It does not suffice, he says, to consider the mind as
a sponge which just soaks up material--such an image cannot account for how
people solve problems or compare and contrast items of information. Nor is
it convincing to see the mind as a general-purpose computer learning program.
While it is certainly helpful to possess a computer, or a set of computers,
the mind also thinks, creates, imagines--all activities that fall outside
our current conceptions of what a computer can do. Mithen declares, "Maybe
when we think of the mind as either a sponge or a computer program we are
joining the psychological equivalent of the flat earth society."
But Mithen still tries to find his own apt metaphors. Borrowing a figure from
psychology, he invites us to think of the mind as a Swiss army knife. On this
view, rather than being a single all-purpose mechanism, the mind is better
thought of as a series of tools, each of which has evolved to carry out a
specific kind of operation. In introducing this image, Mithen draws on a large
number of writings, such as the philosopher Jerry Fodor's description of different
"modules of the mind" (itself based on Noam Chomsky's theory that
the mind comprises not one but many separate "thinking" devices,
each with a separate purpose); the "faculties" that the evolutionary
psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby believe have evolved through natural
selection to cope with adaptive problems faced by scavengers-hunters-gatherers;
and my own theory of eight discrete human "intelligences," ranging
from logical to personal intelligences to the intelligence of the naturalist.
Finally, and most strikingly, Mithen construes the mind as a cathedral, or
a series of cathedrals, by which he does not of course mean literal churches
but buildings whose structure, including their component chapels, emerged
in ways that are analogous to the evolution of the mind. Mithen argues that
historically early cathedrals were thick-walled buildings that had one nave
and several smaller semi-independent chapels built off from it, like outbuildings
on a saltbox farmhouse. By comparison, later cathedrals are taller, more graceful,
with a complex, built-in system of chapels that connect both to the central
nave as well as to each other.
Yet if the nave-chapel metaphor is truly to stand for the idea of a general
intelligence buttressed, as evolution progresses, by a growing number of specialized
intelligences ("chapels"), Mithen would presumably want to show
that real cathedrals grew up in the same progressive way as well--but some
of them didn't. Cathedrals such as Chartres were conceived and created by
purposeful human beings as unified projects. Mithen confuses the issue, and
the reader, by setting up a parallel between the history of the mind and the
history of cathedral architecture when no clear correspondence between them
exists. (It is in any case an odd metaphor since cathedrals are sacred enclosures
which have a specific function of serving as the principal church of a diocese;
and the practices in the different parts of a cathedral, including its chapels,
are drawn from a common faith and common set of rituals.) When Mithen suggests
that the "acts" of human cognitive evolution can be thought of as
a cathedral he seems to be stretching a metaphor and forcing us to strip it
of its habitual associations.
Nor is it easy to accept Mithen's additional idea that each newborn infant
harbors a mental cathedral that gets constructed and finished as the child
matures. Succumbing to the temptation to conflate the personal and historical
that has attracted so many evolutionary theorists since the eighteenth century,
Mithen proposes that the evolution of the mental "cathedral" during
prehistory bears a marked resemblance to the evolution of the mental cathedral
during the childhood of a contemporary person. The mind of an infant or of
a Neanderthal is, in Mithen's view, Romanesque; the mind of an adult Homo
sapiens sapiens is, in contrast, a veritable Chartres. In his view, ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny in three distinct phases, which overlap--somewhat
confusingly--with the prehistorical drama in four acts.
What are those phases? Phase One consists of a mind--the mind of infants and
early hominids--with a "nave" of general intelligence that can,
in rough fashion, process information, make connections, and solve problems.
Phase Two, characterizing young children and hominids of the middle period,
consists of a cathedral with some general intelligence, but with multiple
new chapels, each harboring specialized intelligences. These chapels probably
number at least four: one for technology (the development of tools); one for
natural history (sensitivity to plants, animals, and the environment); one
for language; and one for social understanding--a grasp, for example, of what
it is to participate in a group. During this historical phase the various
chapels function in relative independence of one another. An individual may
have had strong technological and strong social understandings, for example,
but had no way of getting those two faculties to work together. (An early
hominid may have found ways to make use of a stick of wood to probe for termites
without being able to share this skill with fellow hominids.)
Mithen describes in detail the emergence and ultimate interaction of the separate
faculties during the different phases of human evolution. According to his
account, social intelligence--a sense of one's relations with the members
of one's immediate group--emerges first and is, indeed, quite developed even
during the opening scenes of the history of the hominid line. During the second
act, what Mithen calls "natural history intelligence"--an ability
to assess and take advantage of the natural environment--comes into play.
So does a tool-using intelligence; but in the early phases of hominid evolution
this remains unconnected to natural history intelligence--the hominid is alert
to the natural environment but can't effectively use his simple tools to make
consequential changes in it.
During the third phase, Mithen finds the beginnings of the capacity to use
language, but this is almost exclusively tied to social interchanges--a kind
of "grooming in words." (The assumption here is that, much like
apes, preverbal hominids spent up to a third of their time "grooming"
each other as a means of creating and solidifying social bonds. Since language
was a much more effective way of sustaining these bonds and took only a fraction
of the time absorbed by grooming, it presented a great adaptive advantage.)
Some important links were made 100,000 years ago during the early fourth phase
between the "social" and "natural history" capacities,
and between the technical and naturalistic capacities 30,000 years ago. It
was then that tools started to be used to transform nature in cutting trees
and making use of animal skin, for example. The dramatic climax features an
explosion of the linguistic faculty--"once Early Humans started talking,
they just couldn't stop," Mithen declares--and the ultimate yoking of
all four faculties with one another.
It is the capacity to connect the various intelligences, faculties, modules,
or chapels that characterizes the fully evolved individual--be it Homo
sapiens sapiens 30,000 years ago or the mature adult of today. There may,
Mithen thinks, be some kind of general intelligence at work. There may even
be a superchapel that handles "meta-representation" (to which I
shall return); but what allows human beings to become truly human is their
capacity to bring together the operation of different faculties in order to
solve problems, create products, and make original contributions in art, science,
religion, and even cognitive archaeology.
3.
To support his metaphors and arguments, Mithen relies on two rather different
lines of evidence, which, he hopes, will complement and bolster each other.
First of all, there is the evidence that he has assembled as a practicing
cognitive archaeologist. In impressive, well-illustrated tables, he collates
the facts as they are now agreed upon by archaeologists--for example, the
kinds and distribution of tools used during the Pleistocene, some 1.8 million
years ago. He takes up as well issues that remain mired in controversy--for
example, whether Homo sapiens sapiens originated independently more
than once. (He believes it did not.)
By imagining the kinds of thinking that might occur, given the constraints
imposed by the presence or absence of various mental modules, Mithen attempts
to "feel himself" into the life situations faced by different lineages
of early hominids. Drawing on a variety of evidence, he explains in great
detail the different survival pressures that, one can assume, beset individuals
who lived in small or large groups at different times (scattered through the
four acts) and in different ecological niches--forested, open, warm, frigid.
The second line of evidence on which Mithen relies comes from psychology.
Among psychologists, there are fierce disputes about the nature of different
modules, intelligences, and faculties--how many there are, how they function,
their sources, the extent to which they can work together casually or deliberately.
While acknowledging these debates, Mithen attempts to deal ecumenically with
them, trying to extract what the different theories have in common and to
place the competing claims into a broader frame. The result--his "architecture
of the mind," for which, again, his grand metaphor is the cathedral--is
a chronology of the mind's evolution that he divides into phases based on
often contradictory bodies of research. In the final phase, separate mental
functions--or "services"--become harmonized and are able to work
in concert.
Mithen claims here to be drawing on a consensus among a variety of theorists.
Indeed, in one breathless paragraph, he refers to Jerry Fodor's distinctly
non-modular central processes, Howard Gardner's seamlessly operated multiple
intelligences, Paul Rozin's capacities that become extended into other domains,
Annette Karmiloff-Smith's knowledge re-representational capacities, the "mapping
across knowledge systems" of Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, and Margaret
Boden's claim that "creativity arises from the 'transformation of conceptual
spaces.'"
Since Mithen refers in passages such as this one to several highly technical
bodies of knowledge, few readers will be able to evaluate each aspect of his
argument. To turn first to cognitive archaeology, my own reading of the literature
suggests that a number of his analyses are quite controversial. Mithen's firmest
evidence necessarily lies with what has survived: the nature and distribution
of tools and carcasses of various sorts. Even here, however, there is plenty
of room for dispute--for example, about Mithen's conclusions from his investigations
of tool use during the Middle Pleistocene in southeast England. He argues
that sophisticated systems for making hand axes, with provisions for training
the young to manufacture and use them, developed in colder places with relatively
open patterns of vegetation, where large groups could gather. By contrast,
the technology of the more primitive flake (little bits of rough, sharp stone)
was associated with warmer, heavily forested environments where only small
groups gathered and there was little transmission of knowledge.
Perhaps this is so. But the ecology of England at the time is not well known;
it is not clear which hominid line was involved; and new evidence about chimpanzee
capacities suggests that early hominids may have had far greater symbolic
and mimetic abilities than Mithen attributes to them. Nor can the size of
the hominid groups that gathered in one place or another reliably be inferred
from, say, the size of piles of flakes. Even worse, as every cognitive archaeologist
knows, tomorrow's discovery can topple any intricate explanatory scheme, suggesting
how fragmentary our knowledge of prehistory remains. Since reading Mithen's
book in late 1996, Ihave learned of new investigations suggesting that hominids
(with stone tools) existed 400,000 years earlier than previously thought;
that Homo erectus still lived as recently as 27,000 years ago; that
finely crafted spears were created 400,000 years ago; that dogs may have been
domesticated 135,000 years ago; and that Neanderthals may have composed music
for the flute. Each of these finds differs from Mithen's account.
When he discusses the behavior of prehistoric man, Mithen cannot venture far
beyond speculation. How can we know, for example, about the incidence and
nature of linguistic utterances that occurred 200,000 years ago? How can we
be confident about the extent to which mothers--or fathers or siblings or
playmates--attempted to show children different ways to make tools as well
as to hunt and to prepare food? The temptation to choose the interpretation
that fits one's own theory is difficult to resist. All too often--and particularly
when he is trying to decide whether modules are being used in ways that reinforce
one another--Mithen succumbs to this temptation. His recurring dilemma is
revealed when, speaking of an early artistic image, he declares, "We
cannot prove, but equally cannot doubt, that it represents a being in the
mythology of the Upper Paleolithic groups of southern Germany."
When it comes to the literature on child development and adult cognition,
some of the recent evidence is available for inspection--and, as a cognitive-developmental
psychologist, I find most convincing Mithen's claim that human intelligence
lies in the capacity to make connections: through using metaphors as Mithen
tries to do, for instance, or through the unexpected juxtaposition of images
that make us laugh. To make connections is to link the various quasi-independent
intellectual modules (as one does in learning to attach meanings to one's
own or others' squiggles on a slab of stone or a piece of paper). Whatever
the deficiencies of the cathedral metaphor itself, Mithen contributes to scholarship
in the ways he elaborates on it. Here his metaphorical approach invites neurologists
and psychologists to explain just how it is that different parts of the mind/brain
learn to "speak to one another."
On the other hand, I am not in the least persuaded by Mithen's argument that
the earliest phases of cognition--whether in prehistory or in the mind of
an infant--entail a kind of general intelligence. As we have seen, Mithen
believes that the earliest hominids practiced only simple kinds of tool use.
They could not, for example, combine the specific kinds of intelligence needed
for both toolmaking and hunting. When they engaged in hunting and toolmaking
at this early stage, they did so, he writes, by means of "general intelligence."
In invoking general intelligence, he ignores whatever specific sensory, perceptual,
conceptual, or emotional skills the hominids may have employed--singularly
or in concert--in social relations or in the way they used tools.
A similar confusion arises when Mithen bases his argument about the infant's
mind on his reading of two well-known authorities in developmental psychology:
Patricia Greenfield, who has argued that both the use of tools and early language
exploit the same regions of the cortex; and Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a modular
theorist who has nonetheless endorsed parts of Piaget's analysis of general
intellectual development. But even if Greenfield's argument has merit, it
relates at most to two specific capacities: the sequence of actions in the
use of tools and the ordering of linguistic elements in verbal communication.
The apparent parallels in these two "actions" could be deep analogies
or they could be more superficial coincidences. In any event such parallels
do not take account of a large number of other cognitive faculties which Mithen
himself describes, such as "social" intelligence and "natural
history" intelligence.
Moreover, Mithen's version of Karmiloff-Smith's interpretation of Piaget is
hardly convincing. In endorsing Piaget's approach to developmental psychology,
Karmiloff-Smith suggests that there may be some "across-the-board"
changes in cognition--for example, when young people become explicitly aware
of knowledge that was previously intuitive or when older individuals become
capable of "meta-representation"--classifying or recording their
own representations through the use of a "higher- order" language.
However, Karmiloff-Smith takes care to argue that even such "across-the-board"
cognitive changes will occur at different times for different mental modules,
such as those activated in playing a musical instrument or mastering the use
of irregular verbs.
Drawing on research on early infancy, Karmiloff-Smith gives a picture of cognition
that has gained considerable acceptance. That is, during the very first months
of life, human infants display a dizzying array of quite specific, often unrelated
modular capacities. These include the abilities to recognize the sounds of
adult language; to appreciate music tonality, including the differences between
consonant and dissonant intervals; to recognize human facial configurations;
to engage in highly specific communicative exchanges with loving caretakers;
to appreciate simple numerical relations and operations; to imitate actions
of others, even when they cannot observe their own bodies. Moreover, they
understand the basic properties of different objects a full year before Piaget
believed that they could do so. If the archaeological record changes quickly,
reports on infants' hitherto unsuspected skills accumulate on a monthly basis.
Far from providing evidence for the existence and predominance of a general
intelligence, recent research on early infancy provides the strongest clues
to the inherent modularity of human cognition. The problem, as Mithen himself
recognizes elsewhere, is not getting these modules to work--they are constructed
so that they automatically become active under the appropriate circumstances.
What we don't know is how the various modules somehow become able to work
together.
Why should Mithen, among others, be so confused about general intelligence?
Why does he invoke a generalized capacity to explain both the development
of the infant mind and the history of hominid development as well? In my view
the blame partly lies with the dominance of a certain epistemology and partly
with our ordinary language. Dating back to the British empiricists, a strong
strain in our intellectual tradition posits certain basic operations of the
mind, including the capacities to perceive, compare, associate, and infer;
and such capacities are too often identified with general intelligence. The
currently popular metaphor of the computer continues that tradition. Neurons
and minds are said to work by means of basic operations--and, by referring
to these operations (and the various degrees of skill they entail), we can
compare minds across millennia or among different individuals or species.
This perspective also colors our language. Because we talk readily about intelligence
(or general intelligence), we assume that such an entity must exist and be
measurable.
What is wrong with the seemingly plausible notion of general intelligence
is that it has neither a reasonable definition nor evidence to support its
existence. Those who use the words "intelligence" or "general
intelligence" sidestep the question of what we mean by a general intelligence
as opposed to a collection of separate ones. Mithen is at his least consistent
here. At various times, he uses general intelligence to refer to the activities
of species fifty million years ago, such as the ability to find food or to
make cost/benefit analyses; he also identifies general intelligence as the
ability of modern humans to create complex tools or to engage in art, religion,
or science. He speaks vaguely of "general-purpose learning and decision-making
rules." "General" has become so general that it denotes emptiness
and simplicity, as well as complexity, fluidity, and abstractness.
Empirical evidence shows that the mind--human or prehuman--is distinguished
precisely by the fact that it does not treat all experiences or all
problems as equal and does not har-bor all-purpose rules or operations. Whether
one deals with bees, ants, birds, rats, or human beings, the story is always
the same: certain kinds of information are readily apprehended, easily processed,
difficult to forget--while others are only mastered with difficulty or are
ignored altogether. Try to get an infant to recognize faces upside down, or
a toddler to speak a language which does not make phonemic distinctions or
which requires that the child attend to every other word. You will soon discover
the powerful, specific constraints on cognition in Homo sapiens sapiens.
That we know less about Australopithecus does not warrant our assumption
that this ancestor used general intelligence. The problem is to figure out
the specific kinds of intelligence of which Australopithecus was capable--just
as we need to explore the nature of song in sparrows, or maze-running in rats,
or dance communication in bees, or foraging in ants--and try to understand
the highly particular nature of these species' so-called general intelligence.
Fortunately for Mithen's argument, the emptiness of the concept of general
intelligence does not in any decisive sense undermine his argument. Indeed,
were he to jettison it he could simplify his account of prehistory--reduce
it, in fact, to two successive phases of human evolution. In the first there
were a number of specific but unconnected chambers in the cathedral. In the
second there was a larger and better integrated set of chambers as well as
new meta-chambers (for such "modern" functions as consciousness).
On balance, I am sympathetic to what Mithen has set out to do in The Prehistory
of the Mind, and what he has achieved. This seems a good time to attempt
to integrate the separate intellectual traditions represented by evolutionary
psychology, developmental psychology, brain study, and cognitive archeology.
No doubt there are many ways to approach such a project, but Mithen's is one
plausible effort, and others will benefit from his attempt--just as Mithen
himself was stimulated by Merlin Donald's conclusions about origins.
Mithen's achievement--and it is not a small one--is to bring together the
many specific discoveries of cognitive archaeology into a systematic account.
Even those who reject his various metaphorical blueprints of mental evolution
will benefit from his up-to-date and well-organized accounts of scholarly
research. Moreover, and more importantly, the particular question addressed
by Mithen--how specific modules come to work together to form the creative
aspects of human intellect--seems to me precisely the right one for scholars
to be examining at the present time. Notwithstanding his somewhat grandiose
claims, Mithen's book does not explain the creativity of artists or scientists,
or, indeed, of Mithen himself. That is a task that remains for humanists and
scientists. But by drawing on the indispensable contributions of archaeology
to cognitive history, his book begins to explain how we evolved as a species
whose members can think about such things.
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