The Prehistory of the Mind

"Yes, these two books really go quite far in trying to understand the emergence of our unique human abilities through evolution. Steven Mithen starts off by saying, ‘We’ve got a real conundrum here.’ Around 100,000 years ago there is some evidence among homo sapiens of novel tool-making, such as bone artefacts. But he points out that the tools that were used and made then were not that much more sophisticated than our ape ancestors. The major turning point only occurred once homo sapiens had been around for tens of thousands of years. This is what is referred to as the Paleolithic revolution, where we suddenly see far more sophisticated tools, far more sophisticated and developed hunting techniques. You have oceanic travel, cave drawings, ceremonial burials. So moving from very simple tools to a far more sophisticated ways of organising ourselves in groups and even being able to travel over oceans. Mithen says the key challenge is really to try to understand this explosion in creativity around 60,000 years ago, which doesn’t correspond with an increase in brain size – because that was a lot earlier. Brain capacity alone can’t explain this sudden leap forward. His theory is that this explosion is as a result of changes in the nature of language. And, following on from that, he says you then see changes in consciousness within the mind. He argues that the language of early humans, pre-homo sapiens, was exclusively a social language. They used language to send and receive social information, to establish pecking orders and loyalties, etc, rather than using language for subjects such as tool-use or hunting. With larger group sizes language was an effective means of building social ties; much more effective than grooming, which is the staple form of sociability for apes, that’s the way they maintain some kind of group cohesion. Mithen argues very persuasively that this social language, at some point, gets transformed into a general purpose language. It’s only when language starts acting as a way of delivering information about the world other than the social world, that we’re able to really start thinking about our own thought processes. He says that, as a result of that, the whole of human behaviour became pervaded with the flexibility and the creativity that characterises modern humans. Because the real difficulty, if you understand evolution, is that things change very slowly. But here you have this explosion. There must have been a small change in our evolutionary past that allowed language – a social language – to suddenly become a general purpose language, Mithen argues. Some argue that language could be selected for through evolution. But if you look at something as complex as having grammar, and all the aspects of a language, and you look at the evidence of how long language has been around, it hasn’t actually been around for a long time. So if apes didn’t have language, and homo erectus and homo habilis didn’t have language, how could, over the course of several 100,000 years, something as complex as language be a result of a chance mutation? I suppose his argument is that there was this social language. Once you have language, then you can start using that language to drive your own thought process and actually think about what you’re doing – rather than just banging away at something. When you get a tool that is helpful, you’re actually looking at it and thinking, ‘Well, this isn’t good enough, I want to use it for this, maybe it would be better if it was sharper this end, and blunter at that end…’, etc. I read Mithen’s book before I read Tomasello’s and I thought, it’s really persuasive. It’s very convincing. He has a detailed knowledge of everything that we know about early man and what tools existed and suchlike."