NOTES

1. Modernity and Infinity

    1.  Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1967), 297.

    2.  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Putnam, 1955).

    3.  Wild cattle or aurochs (Bos primigenius) are often depicted in cave paintings of Upper Paleolithic age in Europe, and the earliest of these have been directly dated to around 35,000 calibrated radiocarbon years ago. See, for example, Jean Clottes, Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 187.

    4.  Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 231–260; Thomas Wynn, “Handaxe Enigmas,” World Archaeology 27 (1995): 10–24. On the dating of the earliest known bifacial stone tools, see Berhane Asfaw et al., “The Earliest Acheulean from Konso-Gardula,” Nature 360 (1992): 732–735.

    5.  A rare and famous exception to this is the “dance” of the honeybee, which is performed to communicate information about food sources and potential nest sites to other bees. See Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); and Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). See also Derek Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 12–18.

    6.  For a definition and description of mental representation, see, for example, Daniel C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 41–50; Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 51–77; Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 37–41; and Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 79–88.

    7.  See, for example, Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 271–278.

    8.  The best general reference on the evolution of the human hand is John Napier, Hands, rev. Russell H. Tuttle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

    9.  Leslie Aiello and Christopher Dean, An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy (London: Academic Press, 1990), 232–243.

  10.  Ibid., 232.

  11.  Schick and Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, 135–140.

  12.  Ibid., 231–245.

  13.  John F. Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (2007): 370–375.

  14.  Ibid., 375–379.

  15.  Lynn Wadley, “What Is Cultural Modernity? A General View and a South African Perspective from Rose Cottage Cave,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 (2001): 201–221.

  16.  Klein, Human Career, 690.

  17.  Christopher Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean, “The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 627–651.

  18.  Wadley, “What Is Cultural Modernity,” 207–208.

  19.  Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45; Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298 (2002): 1569–1579.

  20.  Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 169–170. Chomsky also has applied the terms “recursion” and “merge” to the same phenomenon in Language and Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 183–184.

  21.  A recent trend in the study of language (the “principles-and-parameters model” and associated themes) represents a departure from traditional concerns with “rules” of syntax and a move toward how language is related to “systems that are internal to the mind.” Noam Chomsky wrote that “languages have no rules in anything like the familiar sense, and no theoretically significant grammatical constructions except as taxonomic artifacts” (The Minimalist Program [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995], 5–6).

  22.  W. Tecumseh Fitch and Marc D. Hauser, “Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate,” Science 303 (2004): 377–380.

  23.  Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch wrote that “the human faculty of language appears to be organized like the genetic code—hierarchical, generative, recursive, and virtually limitless with respect to its scope of expression” (“Faculty of Language,” 1569).

  24.  Michael Corballis, “Recursion as the Key to the Human Mind,” in From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Kim Sterelny and Julie Fitness (New York: Psychology Press, 2003), 155–171.

  25.  Sarnoff A. Mednick, “The Associative Basis of the Creative Process,” Psychological Review (1962): 220–232, quoted in Andreas Kyriacou, “Innovation and Creativity: A Neuropsychological Perspective,” in Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, ed. Sophie A. de Beaune, Frederick L. Coolidge, and Thomas Wynn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15–24.

  26.  Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 3–6.

  27.  Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” 367–376.

  28.  Ibid., 377–378.

  29.  Wind instruments (“pipes”) have been recovered from early Upper Paleolithic sites at Hohle Fels Cave and Giessenklosterle (both Germany) that date to more than 30,000 years ago. See Francesco d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Journal of World Prehistory 17 (2003): 1–70; and Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel, “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 460 (2009): 727–740.

  30.  For a summary review of technological innovations in northern Eurasia during this period, see John F. Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic of Northern Eurasia,” Evolutionary Anthropology 14 (2005): 186–198.

  31.  For definitions of “symbol” and “icon,” originally proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1867, see, for example, Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 60–62.

  32.  Francesco d’Errico, “Palaeolithic Origins of Artificial Memory Systems: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), 19–50. The suggestion that some of these artifacts might be lunar calendars was made by Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).

  33.  For an account of the development of the mechanical clock, see David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

  34.  Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934). Many other authors have commented on the impact of the clock on European world-view, including Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983), 26–78; and Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology (New York: Norton, 1995), 37–101.

  35.  René Descartes, Philosophical Works, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955).

  36.  See, for example, Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2006); and Keith T. Maslin, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

  37.  Hobbes’s comments on Descartes’s mind–body dualism were published in an appendix to Six Metaphysical Meditations in 1641. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949).

  38.  Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  39.  Charles Darwin, “Variation Under Domestication,” in On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859).

  40.  Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought.

  41.  Darwin wrote that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties” (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex [London: John Murray, 1871], 66). The contrasting views of Darwin and Wallace on the mind are discussed in Chomsky, Language and Mind, 173–185.

  42.  Pinker, How the Mind Works, 521.

  43.  The technology most likely to offer insight into the workings of the mind has not been developed, however. It is not the clock, the cow, or the computer, but artificial intelligence, or AI. Although the computational theory of the mind accounts for the metazoan brain—including humans up through the australopithecines and perhaps early Homo—it accounts for only part of the modern human mind. If “strong AI” can be engineered in the next few decades (some are skeptical that it can ever be done), we will, by definition, understand the principles that govern creativity and discrete infinity. See, for example, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005).

  44.  Pinker, How the Mind Works, 525. See also Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a critique of the computational theory of mind, see Jerry A. Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

  45.  John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999); Larry W. Swanson, Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For symbols in the brain, see Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 77–87.

  46.  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 203–215.

  47.  The notion that the unique properties of the mind emerge from a highly complex system is sometimes described as emergent materialism and has been articulated by the philosopher Mario Bunge in The Mind–Body Problem: A Psychobiological Approach (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980), and Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). See also Vernon B. Mountcastle, Perceptual Neuroscience: The Cerebral Cortex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14–16. Chomsky noted that the problem posed by Descartes more than 300 years ago remains unaddressed and that there is still “no substantive ‘body of doctrine’ about the ordinary creative use of language and other manifestations” of creativity (On Nature and Language, 55).

  48.  Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 14–19. Elkhonon Goldberg also wrote, “The human brain is the most complex natural system in the known universe” (The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 21). See also, for example, Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); and Steven Pinker and Jacques Mehler, Connections and Symbols (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).

  49.  Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Throughout Landscape of the Mind, I have asserted that the mind “transcends biological space and time.” In this case, I am defining biological space and time in terms of individual organisms and not genomes, which are biological entities that also transcend the space and time of individual organisms.

  50.  The dispersal of modern humans within and beyond Africa is best illustrated by genetic data collected from living humans. See Spencer Wells, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2007).

  51.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Penguin, 1968), 81.

  52.  William Morton Wheeler, “The Ant-Colony as an Organism,” Journal of Morphology 22 (1911): 307–325.

  53.  Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971); Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: Norton, 2009), 10–13.

  54.  Hobbes, Leviathan, 226.

  55.  Darwin, Origin of Species, 237.

  56.  Hölldobler and Wilson, Super-Organism, 24–29. See also Dawkins, Selfish Gene.

  57.  Although reproductive biology would seem to confine eusociality to invertebrates, one of the few known examples outside the ants, bees, and termites is found among two genera of African mole-rat.

  58.  Richard C. Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). For a recent discussion of the relevance of Lewontin’s findings for the dispersal of modern humans, see Wells, Deep Ancestry, 19–22.

  59.  Goldberg, New Executive Brain, 89–114.

  60.  Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and “The Social Brain Hypothesis,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 178–190.

  61.  Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 103.

  62.  Ibid., 193–199. Edelman and Tononi also wrote, “Once higher-order consciousness begins to emerge, a self can be constructed from social and affective relationships. This self … goes far beyond the biologically based individuality of an animal with primary consciousness” (193).

  63.  Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 20–24.

  64.  Ibid., 29–33. See also Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, “Introduction: Technology as a Philosophical Problem,” in Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York: Free Press, 1983), 22–25.

  65.  Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 5–30. The concept or theory of embodied cognition, developed in the field of psychology, is explicitly based on Heidegger’s philosophy. See, for example, Michael L. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” Artificial Intelligence 149 (2003): 91–30. Anderson summed up one of his colleague’s views thusly: “[R]epresentations are therefore ‘sublimations’ of bodily experience, possessed of content already, and not given content or form by an autonomous mind” (104). In my view, embodied cognition would not survive an encounter with the archaeological record, which contains abundant evidence for external representations that have no basis in bodily experience, beginning probably with bifaces and including much of the geometric urban “landscape of the mind.”

  66.  Samuel Butler, “Darwin Among the Machines,” in The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London: Cape, 1923), 1:208–210. Butler’s ideas about mechanical life (as well as those of Hobbes) are described in George B. Dyson’s remarkable book Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

  67.  Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (London: Collins, 1971).

  68.  David L. Clarke, Analytical Archaeology, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 181.

  69.  Robert Pool, Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 119.

  70.  Schick and Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, 130–133.

  71.  Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” 380–381.

  72.  See, for example, Cordelia Fine, ed., The Britannica Guide to the Brain (London: Constable and Robinson, 2008), 73–86.

  73.  Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  74.  V. Gordon Childe, Society and Knowledge: The Growth of Human Traditions (New York: Harper, 1956), 1.

  75.  Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 5.

  76.  See, for example, Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought, 264–328; and Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19–34.

  77.  See, for example, Ian Hodder, “Theoretical Archaeology: A Reactionary View,” in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 12–13.

  78.  Colin Renfrew, Towards an Archaeology of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Colin Renfrew, “What Is Cognitive Archaeology?” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 3 (1993): 247–270.

  79.  Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind. Donald probably was unaware that similar ideas had been discussed several decades earlier by the French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan, who wrote that “la mémoire de l’homme est extériorisée et son contenant est la collectivité ethnique” (Le Geste et la parole, vol. 2, La mémoire et les rythmes [Paris: Albin Michel, 1965], 64). For a translation, see André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).

  80.  Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, eds., Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998); Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004). See also de Beaune, Coolidge, and Wynn, eds., Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution.

  81.  See, for example, Thomas Wynn, “Tools, Grammar and the Archaeology of Cognition,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 (1991): 191–206; and Colin Renfrew, “Cognitive Archaeology,” in Archaeology: The Key Concepts, ed. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 41–45.

  82.  See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (New York: Viking Press, 1970); and Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

  83.  Nathan Schlanger, “The Chaîne Opératoire,” in Archaeology, ed. Renfrew and Bahn, 25–31. See also Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 231–235.

  84.  Stanley H. Ambrose, “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution,” Science 291 (2001): 1748–1753; Jacques Pelegrin, “Cognition and the Emergence of Language: A Contribution from Lithic Technology,” in Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, ed. de Beaune, Coolidge, and Wynn, 95–108.

  85.  Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).

  86.  Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” 370–375.

  87.  Gordon W. Hewes, “A History of Speculation on the Relation Between Tools and Language,” in Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, ed. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 20–31.

  88.  Ralph Holloway, “Culture: A Human Domain,” Current Anthropology 10 (1969): 395–412.

  89.  James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1967), 81–101; Glynn Ll. Isaac, “Stages of Cultural Elaboration in the Pleistocene: Possible Archaeological Indicators of the Development of Language Capabilities,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280 (1976): 275–288.

  90.  Thomas Wynn, a leading cognitive archaeologist, has been consistently skeptical of the parallels between language and toolmaking, stressing the differences over the similarities in “Tools, Grammar and the Archaeology of Cognition,” and “The Evolution of Tools and Symbolic Behavior,” in Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, ed. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 269–271. The “modular model” of the mind was initially presented in Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). It has had an impact on evolutionary psychology; see, for example, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization,” in Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, ed. Lawrence A. Hirschfield and Susan A. Gelman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–116. For a discussion of the modular model of the mind in the context of cognitive archaeology, see Mithen, Prehistory of the Mind, 37–60.

  91.  Patricia M. Greenfield, “Language, Tools, and Brain: The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Hierarchically Organized Sequential Behavior,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (1991): 531–595.

  92.  Goldberg wrote that “the mental representation of a thing is not modular. It is distributed, since its different sensory components are represented in different parts of the cortex” (New Executive Brain, 54).

  93.  Karen Emmorey, Sonya Mehta, and Thomas J. Grabowski, “The Neural Correlates of Sign Versus Word Production,” NeuroImage 36 (2007): 202–208.

  94.  Klein, Human Career, 647–649; Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, “Working Memory, Its Executive Functions, and the Emergence of Modern Thinking,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15 (2005): 5–26.

  95.  Wolfgang Enard et al., “Molecular Evolution of FOXP2, a Gene Involved in Speech and Language,” Nature 418 (2002): 869–872.

2. Daydreams of the Lower Paleolithic

    1.  Thomas Wynn, “Piaget, Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Intelligence,” World Archaeology 17 (1985): 32–43; John A. J. Gowlett, “The Elements of Design Form in Acheulian Bifaces: Modes, Modalities, Rules and Language,” in Axe Age: Acheulian Tool-making from Quarry to Discard, ed. Naama Goren-Inbar and Gonen Sharon (London: Equinox, 2006), 203–221. The term “mental template” was introduced by the American archaeologist James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1967), 45–49.

    2.  See, for example, Thomas Wynn, “The Evolution of Tools and Symbolic Behaviour,” in Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, ed. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 269.

    3.  Bifaces flaked from bone have been recovered from Lower Paleolithic sites in Italy and Germany. See Paola Villa, “Middle Pleistocene Prehistory in Southwestern Europe: The State of Our Knowledge and Ignorance,” Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1991): 193–217; and Ursula Mania, “The Utilisation of Large Mammal Bones in Bilzingsleben—A Special Variant of Middle Pleistocene Man’s Relationship to His Environment,” ERAUL 62 (1995): 239–246.

    4.  See, for example, Philip V. Tobias, The Brain in Hominid Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 106–108; and Vernon B. Mountcastle, Perceptual Neuroscience: The Cerebral Cortex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20–23.

    5.  David Marr, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982).

    6.  Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 103.

    7.  John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), 2–3.

    8.  Ibid., 3–8. See also Larry W. Swanson, Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11–14. A seminal reference on the early evolution of the brain is G. H. Parker, The Elementary Nervous System (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919).

    9.  Thomas Suddendorf, Donna Rose Addis, and Michael C. Corballis, “Mental Time Travel and the Shaping of the Human Mind,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009): 1317–1324.

  10.  Swanson, Brain Architecture, 16–26; Allman, Evolving Brains, 9–13. See also Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 463–476.

  11.  Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 77–87.

  12.  Mario F. Wulliman, “Brain Phenotypes and Early Regulatory Genes: The Bauplan of the Metazoan Central Nervous System,” in Brain Evolution and Cognition, ed. Gerhard Roth and Mario F. Wulliman (New York: Wiley, 2001), 11–40; Swanson, Brain Architecture, 29–38. A general source on invertebrate brains is Theodore Holmes Bullock and G. Adrian Horridge, Structure and Function in the Nervous Systems of Invertebrates (San Francisco: Freeman, 1965).

  13.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 68–73.

  14.  Matthew H. Nitecki, ed., Evolutionary Innovations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  15.  C. Gans and G. Northcutt, “Neural Crest and the Origin of the Vertebrates: A New Head,” Science 220 (1983): 268–274; Allman, Evolving Brains, 73–79; Swan-son, Brain Architecture, 40–79.

  16.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 75–78.

  17.  Dawkins, Ancestor’s Tale, 293–319.

  18.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 92–106.

  19.  Mountcastle, Perceptual Neuroscience, 19–25; Georg F. Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 2005), 255–296.

  20.  Glenn C. Conroy, Primate Evolution (New York: Norton, 1990).

  21.  Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution, 303–304.

  22.  Robin Dunbar, “The Social-Brain Hypothesis,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 178–190.

  23.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 122–157; Streidter, Principles of Brain Evolution, 305–310.

  24.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 143–146; Streidter, Principles of Brain Evolution, 301–305.

  25.  Robert Martin, Primate Origins and Evolution: A Phylogenetic Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). It has been noted that tree squirrels possess laterally placed eyes, which seems to undercut the arboreal theory; despite the placement of their eyes, however, there is some overlap in their fields of vision.

  26.  Matt Cartmill, “Rethinking Primate Origins,” Science 184 (1974): 436–443.

  27.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 144–146.

  28.  W. E. Le Gros Clark, History of the Primates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 45–53.

  29.  Allman, Evolving Brains, 146–149.

  30.  See, for example, Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 213–214.

  31.  Marr, Vision, 3–6.

  32.  Michael C. Corballis, The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 218–222.

  33.  Marr, Vision, 37, table 1-1.

  34.  In this context, music—especially the complex musical structures developed by composers like Mozart and Bach—becomes a particularly striking creative product of the mind. Most of the material structures generated by the mind appear to have a logical basis in (restructured) natural visual representations. But complex sound structures seem to lack such a “natural” basis. Natural sounds tend to blend and are difficult to represent spatially in the brain with precision; accordingly, the artificial sounds produced by musical instruments are to a significant degree structured temporally. See Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  35.  Conroy, Primate Evolution, 200–248; Klein, Human Career, 112–119.

  36.  For an excellent account of Proconsul aimed at the general reader, see Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, The Ape in the Tree: An Intellectual and Natural History of Proconsul (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews, The Complete World of Human Evolution (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 92–95.

  37.  Klein, Human Career, 119–127. Brain volume for Dryopithecus has been estimated on the basis of a cranium recovered from Rudabánya (Hungary).

  38.  Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–4.

  39.  Roger Lewin and Robert A. Foley, Principles of Human Evolution (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), 210–212.

  40.  Russell H. Tuttle, Apes of the World: Their Social Behavior, Communication, Mentality and Ecology (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes, 1986); William McGrew, The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Recent analysis of 4.4-million-year-old fossils assigned to Ardipithecus seem to confirm that early humans “never knuckle-walked.” See Tim D. White et al., “Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids,” Science 326 (2009): 75–86.

  41.  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 279–311.

  42.  Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).

  43.  Views regarding the cognitive powers of chimpanzees and the other great apes vary widely. A number of primatologists believe that apes evolved their own unique level of cognition—including “generativity, and cognitive fluidity as well as … mental representation of absent items, perspective taking, cooperative hunting, food sharing, and symbolic communication”—that provided an essential context for the emergence of the human mind. See Anne E. Russon and David R. Begun, “Evolutionary Origins of Great Ape Intelligence: An Integrated View,” in The Evolution of Thought: Evolutionary Origins of Great Ape Intelligence, ed. Anne E. Russon and David R. Begun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 353–368. A more cautious approach has been pursued by Daniel Povinelli and his students, who base their conclusions on a series of controlled experiments designed to reveal knowledge among apes through object manipulation and problem solving; they concluded that chimpanzees are incapable of forming concepts about entities that they cannot observe directly. See Daniel J. Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee’s Theory of How the World Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  44.  Peter S. Rodman and Henry M. McHenry, “Bioenergetics and the Origin of Hominid Bipedalism,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 52 (1980): 103–106.

  45.  Klein, Human Career, 271–278.

  46.  Lewin and Foley, Principles of Human Evolution, 241–253.

  47.  John H. Langdon, The Human Strategy: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Anatomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 116–128.

  48.  Jonathan Kingdon, Lowly Origin: Where, When, and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 118–147.

  49.  Michel Brunet et al., “A New Hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa,” Nature 418 (2002): 145–801. See also Bernard Wood, Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63–65.

  50.  K. Galik et al., “External and Internal Morphology of the BAR 1002’00 Orrorin tugenensis Femur,” Science 305 (2004): 1450–1453.

  51.  Wood, Human Evolution, 65–67.

  52.  Tim D. White, Gen Suwa, and Berhane Asfaw, “Australopithecus ramidus, a New Species of Early Hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia,” Nature 371 (1994): 306–312. The classification of these fossils was subsequently revised to the genus Ardipithecus. See White et al., “Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids,” 80–81.

  53.  Meave G. Leakey et al., “New Four-Million-Year-Old Hominid Species from Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya,” Nature 376 (1995): 565–571.

  54.  Lewin and Foley, Principles of Human Evolution, 261–262.

  55.  Randall L. Susman, Jack T. Stern, and William J. Jungers, “Locomotor Adaptations in the Hadar Hominids,” in Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, ed. Eric Delson (New York: Liss, 1985), 184–192.

  56.  There are four major references on the hand. The earliest is Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (New York: Harper, 1840). The second is John Napier, Hands, rev. Russell H. Tuttle (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). The third is Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).The most recent source, with emphasis on neuroanatomy, is Vernon B. Mountcastle, The Sensory Hand: Neural Mechanisms of Somatic Sensation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  57.  Mountcastle, Sensory Hand, 35–36.

  58.  Ibid., 41–44.

  59.  Ibid., 1–6.

  60.  Napier, Hands, 55.

  61.  The length of the thumb × 100/length of the index finger = the opposability index, which is 60 for living humans. See ibid., 57–58.

  62.  Ibid., 61–63.

  63.  John Napier, “The Evolution of the Hand,” Scientific American 207 (1962): 56–62, and Hands, 29–38.

  64.  Napier, Hands, 62; Mountcastle, Sensory Hand, 38–40.

  65.  Napier, Hands, 73–74.

  66.  Ibid., 57–58.

  67.  Walker and Shipman, Ape in the Tree, 74–75.

  68.  Salvador Moyà-Solà and Meike Köhler, “A Dryopithecus Skeleton and the Origin of Great-Ape Locomotion,” Nature 379 (1996): 156–159; Lewin and Foley, Principles of Human Evolution, 219–220.

  69.  Napier, Hands, 67–77.

  70.  White et al., “Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids,” 80–81.

  71.  Michael E. Bush et al., “Hominid Carpal, Metacarpal, and Phalangeal Bones Recovered from the Hadar Formation: 1974–1977 Collections,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 57 (1982): 651–677.

  72.  Mary W. Marzke, “Joint Functions and Grips of the Australopithecus afarensis Hand, with Special Reference to the Region of the Capitate,” Journal of Human Evolution 12 (1983): 197–211. See also Leslie Aiello and Christopher Dean, An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy (London: Academic Press, 1990), 385–388.

  73.  John Napier, “Fossil Hand Bones from Olduvai Gorge,” Nature 196 (1962): 409–411, and Hands, 88–89; Aiello and Dean, Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy, 389–392. The hand bones include three carpals, eleven phalanges, and one metacarpal fragment from Olduvai Hominid 7 assigned to Homo habilis from Bed I at Olduvai Gorge.

  74.  Randall L. Susman, “Hand of Paranthropus robustus from Member 1, Swartkrans: Fossil Evidence for Tool Behavior,” Science 240 (1988): 781–784.

  75.  Klein, Human Career, 259–261.

  76.  Alan Walker and Richard E. Leakey, “The Postcranial Bones,” in The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton, ed. Alan Walker and Richard E. Leakey (Berlin: Springer, 1993), 136–138. The bones include two first metacarpal shafts (?) and two phalanges.

  77.  John F. Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (2007): 359–387.

  78.  See, for example, Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 227–237. The term “Oldowan” is derived from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

  79.  Sileshi Semaw, “The Oldest Stone Artifacts from Gona (2.6–2.5 Ma), Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for Understanding the Earliest Stages of Stone Knapping,” in The Oldowan: Case Studies into the Earliest Stone Age, ed. Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick (Gosport, Ind.: Stone Age Institute Press, 2006), 43–75. The term “Acheulean” is derived from Saint-Acheul in France.

  80.  See, for example, Mary D. Leakey, Olduvai Gorge, vol. 3, Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). The volume describes and illustrates stone artifacts of Oldowan and Acheulean assemblages. Note that some artifacts classified as “proto-bifaces” of the Oldowan are fully bifacially flaked (for example, fig. 51[2] on p. 101), while some artifacts classified as “bifaces” of the succeeding Acheulean are only partially bifacially flaked (for example, fig. 63 on p. 129).

  81.  Bifaces do not appear outside Africa until about 1.4 million years ago, and they remain rare or absent in many parts of Eurasia during the Lower Paleolithic, especially in the Far East and eastern Europe. As far as we know, the economy of humans inhabiting these places (chiefly Homo erectus) was similar to that of humans living in Africa and western Europe, and they apparently used Oldowan tools to perform the same function(s) as large bifacial tools. See, for example, Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon, Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–107. For the analysis of microscopic wear patterns on hand axes, see Lawrence H. Keeley, “Microwear Analysis of Lithics,” in The Lower Paleolithic Site at Hoxne, England, ed. Ronald Singer, Bruce G. Gladfelter, and John J. Wymer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 129–138. Microscopic use-wear (almost entirely attributed to meat and bone polish from butchery) was identified on roughly forty bifaces from Boxgrove (England), as discussed in Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, Fairweather Eden: Life in Britain Half a Million Years Ago as Revealed by the Excavations at Boxgrove (London: Century, 1998), 285–287.

  82.  Semaw, “Oldest Stone Artifacts from Gona,” 68–69.

  83.  Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, “An Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex: The Sites and the Nature of Their Evidence,” in Oldowan, ed. Toth and Schick, 18. Remains of Homo are associated with Oldowan artifacts at Hadar (Ethiopia), Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), and Swartkrans (South Africa).

  84.  Nicholas Toth et al., “Pan the Toolmaker: Investigations into the Stone Tool-Making and Tool-Using Capabilities of a Bonobo (Pan paniscus),” Journal of Archaeological Science 20 (1993): 81–91; Nicholas Toth, Kathy Schick, and Sileshi Semaw, “A Comparative Study of the Stone Tool-Making Skills of Pan, Australopithecus, and Homo sapiens,” in Oldowan, ed. Toth and Schick, 155–222.

  85.  Schick and Toth, “Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex,” 28–29.

  86.  R. X. Zhu et al., “Early Evidence of the Genus Homo in East Asia,” Journal of Human Evolution 55 (2008): 1075–1085.

  87.  Schick and Toth, “Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex,” 9–10.

  88.  Leakey, Olduvai Gorge.

  89.  Nicholas Toth, “The Oldowan Reassessed: A Close Look at Early Stone Artifacts,” Journal of Archaeological Science 12 (1985): 101–120. See also Schick and Toth, “Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex,” 5–9.

  90.  Schick and Toth, “Overview of the Oldowan Industrial Complex,” 9–10; Klein, Human Career, 252–259.

  91.  See, for example, Richard Potts and Pat Shipman, “Cutmarks Made by Stone Tools on Bones from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,” Nature 291 (1981): 577–580; and Henry T. Bunn and Ellen M. Kroll, “Systematic Butchery by Plio/Pleistocene Hominids at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,” Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 431–452.

  92.  Lawrence H. Keeley and Nicholas Toth, “Microwear Polishes on Early Stone Tools from Koobi Fora, Kenya,” Nature 293 (1981): 464–466.

  93.  Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo and Travis Rayne Pickering, “Early Hominid Hunting and Scavenging: A Zooarchaeological Review,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 275–282.

  94.  Klein, Human Career, 157–160.

  95.  Potts and Shipman, “Cutmarks Made by Stone Tools on Bones from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.”.

  96.  Leakey, Olduvai Gorge, 1–3. Leakey defined the Acheulean assemblages at Olduvai Gorge as those containing at least 40 percent bifaces among the tools.

  97.  Berhane Asfaw et al., “The Earliest Acheulean from Konso-Gardula,” Nature 360 (1992): 732–735; Klein, Human Career, 373–381.

  98.  Toth, “Oldowan Reassessed,” 101–120.

  99.  Leakey, Olduvai Gorge, 21–123. The most likely candidate for an Oldowan artifact based on a mental template would seem to be those classified as “spheroids,” which Leakey described as “stone balls, smoothly rounded over the whole exterior” (6). On the basis of experiments, Schick and Toth concluded that these probably represent heavily battered hammerstones: “[A]fter approximately four hours of percussion these quartz hammers assumed a remarkably spherical shape without any necessary intent or predetermination” (Making Silent Stones Speak, 130–133).

100. If there is some debate about the implications of other developments in Paleolithic technology for human cognitive faculties (for example, Levallois prepared cores), there is near consensus on the biface as a “mental template,” including among archaeologists of the cognitive variety. See, for example, Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 117–119; Jacques Pelegrin, “Cognition and the Emergence of Language: A Contribution from Lithic Technology,” in Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, ed. Sophie A. de Beaune, Frederick L. Coolidge, and Thomas Wynn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 100–102; and Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 110–113. An alternative view was expressed by William Noble and Iain Davidson: “The repeated forms of stone artefacts such as handaxes seem likely to be the result of learned motor actions rather than deliberate design or ‘planned’ attempts to reproduce a ‘mental template’ of the ideal form” (Human Evolution, Language and Mind: A Psychological and Archaeological Inquiry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 200).

101. H. Roche et al., “Early Hominid Stone Tool Production and Technical Skill 2.34 Myr Ago in West Turkana, Kenya,” Nature 399 (1999): 57–60. See also Pelegrin, “Cognition and the Emergence of Language,” 98–100.

102. PET scans done of human subjects as they flake stone indicate activation of brain areas associated with both motor activities and multimodal sensory inputs: “vision, touch, and proprioception, or sense of body position and motion” (Dietrich Stout et al., “Stone Tool-Making and Brain Activation: Positron Emission Tomography [PET] Studies,” Journal of Archaeological Science 27 [2000]: 1215). See also Dietrich Stout and Thierry Chaminde, “The Evolutionary Neuroscience of Tool Making,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 1091–1100. For a discussion of the potential importance of “talking to oneself” to the evolution of consciousness and thinking, see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 193–226.

103. Gowlett, “Elements of Design Form in Acheulian Bifaces.”.

104. Schick and Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, 258–260; Keeley, “Microwear Analysis of Lithics,” 135–137.

105. William H. Calvin, “The Unitary Hypothesis: A Common Neural Circuitry for Novel Manipulations, Language, Plan-Ahead, and Throwing?” in Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution, ed. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 230–250.

106. Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins (New York: Knopf, 1996).

107. Robert L. Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

108. Christoph. M. Monahan, “New Zooarchaeological Data from Bed II, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania: Implications for Hominid Behavior in the Early Pleistocene,” Journal of Human Evolution 31 (1996): 93–128.

109. See, for example, Arthur J. Jelinek, “The Lower Paleolithic: Current Evidence and Interpretation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977): 11–32; and Pitts and Roberts, Fairweather Eden, 287.

110. David Lordkipanidze et al., “Postcranial Evidence from Early Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia,” Nature 449 (2007): 305–310.

111. For example, Grahame Clark, World Prehistory in New Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 30.

112. John R. Searle, The Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19.

113. The late J. Desmond Clark is quoted as suggesting that the communications of the biface-makers probably resembled the bifaces: “the same things over and over and over again” (Schick and Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, 280).

114. See, for example, John Wymer, Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as Represented by the Thames Valley (London: Baker, 1968), 46–60.

115. François Bordes, Typologie du Paléolithique ancient et moyen (Bordeaux: Imprimeries Delmas, 1961); Derek Roe, “British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Handaxe Groups,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 34 (1968): 245–267; P. Callow, “The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Britain and Adjacent Areas of Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1976).

116. Glynn Ll. Isaac, Olorgesailie: Archeological Studies of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 116–145.

117. Shannon P. McPherron, “What Typology Can Tell Us About Acheulian Handaxe Production,” in Axe Age, ed. Goren-Inbar and Sharon, 267–285.

118. Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anna Belfer-Cohen, “From Africa to Eurasia—Early Dispersals,” Quaternary International 75 (2001): 19–28. The earliest dated occurrence of bifaces in North Africa seems to be at Casablanca (Morocco), where early Acheulean artifacts of quartzite and flint date to about a million years ago. See Jean-Paul Raynal et al., “The Earliest Occupation of North-Africa: The Moroccan Perspective,” Quaternary International 75 (2001): 68–69.

119. G. Philip Rightmire, “Human Evolution in the Middle Pleistocene: The Role of Homo heidelbergensis,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 218–227.

120. For example, Klein, Human Career, 330–343.

121. Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, “From Africa to Eurasia,” 24.

122. Manuel Santonja and Paola Villa, “The Acheulean of Western Europe,” in Axe Age, ed. Goren-Inbar and Sharon, 429–478. Bifaces are reported from Notarchirico (southern Italy) in deposits that underlie a volcanic tephra dating to 640,000 years ago.

123. Michael D. Petraglia, “The Lower Palaeolithic of India and Its Bearing on the Asian Record,” in Early Human Behaviour in Global Context: The Rise and Diversity of the Lower Paleolithic Record, ed. Michael D. Petraglia and Ravi Korisettar (London: Routledge, 1998), 343–390.

124. Thomas Wynn and Forrest Tierson, “Regional Comparison of the Shapes of Later Acheulean Handaxes,” American Anthropologist 92 (1990): 73–84.

3. Modern Humans and the Super-Brain

    1.  Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

    2.  Francesco d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Journal of World Prehistory 17 (2003): 1–70.

    3.  John F. Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic of Northern Eurasia,” Evolutionary Anthropology 14 (2005): 186–198.

    4.  Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean, “The Origin of Modern Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 627–651.

    5.  Lyn Wadley, “What Is Cultural Modernity? A General View and a South African Perspective from Rose Cottage Cave,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 (2001): 201–221. The concept of material “storage of symbols” was introduced in Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

    6.  Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–46; Michael Corballis, “Recursion as the Key to the Human Mind,” in From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Kim Sterelny and Julie Fitness (New York: Psychology Press, 2003), 155–171.

    7.  According to Steven Pinker, “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world” (How the Mind Works [New York: Norton, 1997], 528).

    8.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 1:18–19. Lévi-Strauss noted that while painters draw on natural color, “there are no musical sounds in nature.”.

    9.  d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music.”.

  10.  See, for example, William Noble and Iain Davidson, “The Evolutionary Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: Language and Its Archaeology,” Man 26 (1991): 223–253; and Paul Mellars, The Neanderthal Legacy: An Archaeological Perspective from Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 387–419.

  11.  Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), and On Nature and Language, 92–161.

  12.  Klein, Human Career, 514–517; Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, “Working Memory, Its Executive Functions, and the Emergence of Modern Thinking,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15 (2005): 5–26.

  13.  Stanley H. Ambrose, “Late Pleistocene Human Population Bottlenecks, Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 34 (1998): 623–651.

  14.  John J. Shea, “Neandertals, Competition, and the Origin of Modern Human Behavior in the Levant,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 173–187. A recent report on the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome based on ancient DNA suggests that genic exchange between Neanderthals and modern humans may have occurred in the Near East before 100,000 years ago. See Richard E. Green et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328 (2010): 710–722.

  15.  One aspect of modernity that may have evolved originally for a different function is that the neural structures underlying creative language use could have been derived from the evolution of throwing objects. See William H. Calvin, “The Unitary Hypothesis: A Common Neural Circuitry for Novel Manipulations, Language, Plan-Ahead, and Throwing?” in Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution, ed. Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 230–250. See also, for example, Ian Tattersall, “Human Origins: Out of Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 16020.

  16.  Tattersall, “Human Origins,” 16018.

  17.  G. Philip Rightmire, “Human Evolution in the Middle Pleistocene: The Role of Homo heidelbergensis,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 218–227.

  18.  On the energy and nutritional requirements of large brains, see T. Westermarck and E. Antila, “Diet in Relation to the Nervous System,” in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 10th ed., ed. J. S. Garrow, W. P. T. James, and A. Ralph (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 2000), 715–730. On the choking risk created by the modern vocal tract, see Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 271–283.

  19.  Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 37–50.

  20.  Gerhardt von Bonin, The Evolution of the Human Brain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 41–43; Philip V. Tobias, The Brain in Hominid Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 101–103.

  21.  Klein suggests that a mutation related to speech occurred roughly 50,000 years ago among anatomically modern humans in Africa (“neural hypothesis”), in Human Career, 647–653.

  22.  See, for example, G. Philip Rightmire, “Homo in the Middle Pleistocene: Hypodigms, Variation, and Species Recognition,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 8–21.

  23.  Pamela R. Willoughby, The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa: A Comprehensive Guide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2007), 17–194; Ralph L. Holloway et al., “Evolution of the Brain in Humans—Paleoneurology,” in Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, ed. Mark D. Binder, Nobutaka Hirokawa, and Uwe Windhorst (New York: Springer, 2009), 1326–1334.

  24.  Rightmire, “Homo in the Middle Pleistocene,” 12–13.

  25.  The pattern of cold-climate adaptation in Neanderthal anatomy was first noted in Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1963), 542–548. More recent studies include Erik Trinkaus, “Neanderthal Limb Proportions and Cold Adaptation,” in Aspects of Human Evolution, ed. Chris Stringer (London: Taylor & Francis, 1981), 187–224. For a current view, see Timothy D. Weaver, “The Meaning of Neandertal Skeletal Morphology,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 16028–16033. Weaver argues that genetic drift was a significant factor in many characteristic Neanderthal features.

  26.  Ralph L. Holloway, “The Poor Brain of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis: See What You Please …,” in Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, ed. Eric Delson (New York: Liss, 1985), 319–324.

  27.  Trenton W. Holliday, “Postcranial Evidence of Cold Adaptation in European Neandertals,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 104 (1997): 245–258. For a discussion of Neanderthal anatomy and technology, see John F. Hoffecker, A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the Higher Latitudes (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 53–55.

  28.  Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and “The Social Brain Hypothesis,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 178–190. The evolutionary biology of eusociality may offer some insight into the selection pressures that lay behind language and the super-brain, despite the difference between the super-brain and a super-organism. True social behavior among the insects is thought to have evolved as a result of “progressive provisioning” of offspring by solitary females. In theory, selection would favor eusociality when the long-term reproductive fitness of offspring was enhanced by remaining at the nest site to help the parent provision larvae rather than by dispersing to reproduce as another solitary female. See Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: Norton, 2009), 31–42. It has long been assumed that among early humans, provisioning of females and offspring became an increasingly important factor in long-term reproductive success as the demands of child care expanded.

  29.  Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, 60–64.

  30.  Miriam Noël Haidle, “How to Think a Spear,” in Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, ed. Sophie A. de Beaune, Frederick L. Coolidge, and Thomas Wynn (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2009), 57–73.

  31.  See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

  32.  Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002).

  33.  Perhaps spoken language and symbolism—and the super-brain they enabled—were at least in part a response to information overload in anatomically modern humans roughly 100,000 years ago. Language obviously provided a means of sharing information among individual brains, but it also would have enhanced the organization and storage of information. In Africa, modern humans would have been exposed to greater potential for information overload than would Neanderthals because the former occupied a more complex environmental setting than the latter. Brain size in modern humans subsequently declined, which would seem to reflect the decreased need for information storage in individual brains as greater quantities of information came to be stored outside the brain (and perhaps better organized). See, for example, Tobias, Brain in Hominid Evolution, 100–103.

  34.  Ralph L. Holloway, “Brief Communication: How Much Larger Is the Relative Volume of Area 10 of the Prefrontal Cortex in Humans?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 118 (2002): 399–401; Daniel E. Lieberman, “Speculations About the Selective Basis for Modern Human Craniofacial Form,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 55–68.

  35.  Marcus E. Raichle et al., “Practice-related Changes in Human Brain Functional Anatomy During Nonmotor Learning,” Cerebral Cortex 4 (1994): 8–26; Peter Hagoort et al., “Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension,” Science 304 (2004): 438–441; Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22–24.

  36.  Osbjorn M. Pearson, “Statistical and Biological Definitions of ‘Anatomically Modern’ Humans: Suggestions for a Unified Approach to Modern Morphology,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 38–48. Chet S. Sherwood and colleagues also stress the likely importance of increases in the size of the cerebellum relative to body size in modern humans, as well as the connections between the cerebellum and the neocortex, observing that “these connections may be the anatomical substrate supporting the postulated cerebellar involvement in cognition, beyond its traditionally recognized role in motor coordination” (“Evolution of the Brain in Humans—Comparative Perspective,” in Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, ed. Binder, Hirokawa, and Windhorst, 1336).

  37.  Jeffrey Laitman, “The Anatomy of Human Speech,” Natural History, August 1984, 20–27; Lieberman, Biology and Evolution of Language, 271–283.

  38.  Leslie Aiello and Christopher Dean, An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy (London: Academic Press, 1990), 232–243.

  39.  Russell H. Tuttle, Apes of the World: Their Social Behavior, Communication, Mentality and Ecology (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes, 1986), 36–39.

  40.  Aiello and Dean, Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy, 232.

  41.  See, for example, Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 211–212. Noam Chomsky has written about the difficulty of appreciating the strangeness of a phenomenon that is so familiar to all, in Language and Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–23.

  42.  Chomsky wrote, “The use of language for communication might turn out to be a kind of epiphenomenon” (On Nature and Language, 107). Terrence W. Deacon suggested that language was similar to a virus that had co-evolved symbiotically with humans, in his widely read book The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997). A similar argument was made earlier in Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974). The thesis has been criticized rather sharply by Chomsky, who complained that it “seem[s] only to reshape standard problems of science as utter mysteries” (On Nature and Language, 83). In a more recent paper, Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater again advanced the notion that language represents an “interdependent organism” (“Language as Shaped by the Brain,” Brain and Behavioral Sciences 32 [2008]: 489–558). Although I am skeptical of this idea (it seems to be a form of animism), the central theme of the paper makes sense to me; I also would guess that language has been “shaped by the brain” because it encodes internal mental representations for transmission in external form from one brain to another.

  43.  Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298 (2002): 1569–1579.

  44.  Lieberman, Biology and Evolution of Language, 287–313; Richard F. Kay, Matt Cart-mill, and Michelle Balow, “The Hypoglossal Canal and the Origin of Human Vocal Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (1988): 5417–5419; Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (New York: Norton, 1998); David De Gusta, W. Henry Gilbert, and Scott P. Turner, “Hypoglossal Canal Size and Hominid Speech,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (1999): 1800–1804; W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Review,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000): 258–267.

  45.  d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music,” 27–31.

  46.  Green et al., “Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome”; Wolfgang Enard et al., “Molecular Evolution of FOXP2, a Gene Involved in Speech and Language,” Nature 418 (2002): 869–872.

  47.  Stanley H. Ambrose, “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution,” Science 291 (2001): 1748–1753.

  48.  James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1967), 83–101. Deetz subsequently described spoken language as material culture “in its gaseous state” (In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of American Life [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977], 24–25). The importance of multiple hierarchical levels for infinite creative potential is addressed in W. Tecumseh Fitch and Marc D. Hauser, “Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate,” Science 303 (2004): 377–380.

  49.  For a discussion of the “generative interplay between the mental and material activities” of individuals and artifacts in the context of Europe 250,000 years ago, see Nathan Schlanger, “Understanding Levallois: Lithic Technology and Cognitive Archaeology,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6 (1996): 231–254. This recalls the observations on refitted cores from a 2.3-million-year-old Oldowan site in East Africa described in chapter 2 (H. Roche et al., “Early Hominid Stone Tool Production and Technical Skill 2.34 Myr Ago in West Turkana, Kenya,” Nature 399 [1999]: 57–60), although it is apparent that the number of hierarchically organized steps is significantly greater by 250,000 years ago.

  50.  Derek Bickerton argues that syntactic language was logically preceded by a non-syntactic form of language comparable to that of very young children, in Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 130–163.

  51.  Eric Boëda, “Levallois: A Volumetric Construction, Methods, a Technique,” in The Definition and Interpretation of Levallois Technology, ed. Harold L. Dibble and Ofer Bar-Yosef (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1995), 41–68. See also Philip Van Peer, The Levallois Reduction Strategy (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1992); and Mellars, Neanderthal Legacy. In recent decades, the analysis of prepared cores has shifted from an emphasis on finished core types to study of manufacturing processes.

  52.  Boëda, “Levallois,” 46. See also Schlanger, “Understanding Levallois.”.

  53.  Boëda, “Levallois,” 53.

  54.  Nicholas Rolland, “Levallois Technique Emergence: Single or Multiple? A Review of the Euro-African Record,” in Definition and Interpretation of Levallois Technology, ed. Dibble and Bar-Yosef, 333–359. The emergence of prepared-core techniques in Africa has been tied for many years to the earlier “Victoria West” cores, but a direct link recently has been challenged in Stephen J. Lycett, “Are Victoria West Cores ‘Proto-Levallois’? A Phylogenetic Assessment,” Journal of Human Evolution 56 (2009): 175–191.

  55.  Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,s” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 487–490. Lower Paleolithic artifacts from Peninj (Tanzania) dating to 1.6 to 1.4 million years ago are thought to reflect early experimentation with controlling flake products from cores. See Ignacio del Torre et al., “The Oldowan Industry of Peninj and Its Bearing on the Reconstruction of the Technological Skills of Lower Pleistocene Hominids,” Journal of Human Evolution 44 (2003): 203–224.

  56.  See, for example, Robert Foley and Marta Mirazon Lahr, “On Stony Ground: Lithic Technology, Human Evolution, and the Emergence of Culture,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 109–122.

  57.  Rolland, “Levallois Technique Emergence,” 345–351; Mark White and Nick Ashton, “Lower Palaeolithic Core Technology and the Origins of the Levallois Method in North-Western Europe,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 598–609.

  58.  Mellars, Neanderthal Legacy, 61–84.

  59.  For an overview of technology, including composite implements, among foraging peoples, see Wendell H. Oswalt, An Anthropological Analysis of Food-Getting Technology (New York: Wiley, 1976). Oswalt broke down individual implements into their component parts (“techno-units”) for a comparative analysis of technological complexity.

  60.  Composite weapons in the form of microblade-inset spear points are known from several late Upper Paleolithic sites in northeastern Asia. See Craig M. Lee, “Microblade Technology in Beringia” [box], in John F. Hoffecker and Scott A. Elias, Human Ecology of Beringia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 122–126.

  61.  Sylvia Beyries, “Functional Variability of Lithic Sets in the Middle Paleolithic,” in Upper Pleistocene Prehistory of Western Eurasia, ed. Harold L. Dibble and Anta Montet-White (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1988), 213–224; Patricia Anderson-Gerfaud, “Aspects of Behavior in the Middle Palaeolithic: Functional Analysis of Stone Tools from Southwest France,” in The Emergence of Modern Humans: An Archaeological Perspective, ed. Paul Mellars (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 389–418; Marlize Lombard, “Evidence of Hunting and Hafting During the Middle Stone Age at Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal: A Multianalytical Approach,” Journal of Human Evolution 48 (2005): 279–300.

  62.  Eric Boëda et al., “Bitumen as a Hafting Material on Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts,” Nature 380 (1996): 336–338; McBrearty and Brooks, “Revolution That Wasn’t,” 497; Bruce L. Hardy et al., “Stone Tool Function at the Paleolithic Sites of Starosele and Buran Kaya III, Crimea: Behavioral Implications,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 10972–10977; Marlize Lombard, “The Gripping Nature of Ochre: The Association of Ochre with Howiesons Poort Adhesives and Later Stone Age Mastics from South Africa,” Journal of Human Evolution 53 (2007): 406–419.

  63.  Paola Villa et al., “The Howiesons Poort and MSA III at Klasies River Main Site, Cave 1A,” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010): 630–655.

  64.  Archaeologists interested in the development of human cognitive faculties sometimes have been unimpressed with Levallois prepared-core technology. William Noble and Iain Davidson were skeptical of the intentional control over blank size and shape and, more generally, found the technique “not important” (Human Evolution, Language and Mind: A Psychological and Archaeological Inquiry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 200–201). Thomas Wynn thought the required concepts of Levallois core technology “no more complex than those required for fine bifaces” (“The Evolution of Tools and Symbolic Behaviour,” in Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, ed. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999], 273). These views do not seem to take into account the likely connection between Levallois cores and composite implements.

  65.  Ambrose, “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution,” 1751.

  66.  James B. Rowe et al., “The Prefrontal Cortex: Response Selection or Maintenance Within Working Memory?” Science 288 (2000): 1656–1560; Coolidge and Wynn, “Working Memory.” See also Cordelia Fine, ed., The Britannica Guide to the Brain (London: Constable and Robinson, 2008), 112–118; and Goldberg, New Executive Brain, 92–98.

  67.  Hagoort et al., “Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension”; Goldberg, New Executive Brain, 23–24.

  68.  John F Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (2007): 359–387.

  69.  Katherine Scott, “Two Hunting Episodes of Middle Palaeolithic Age at La Cotte de Saint-Brelade, Jersey (Channel Islands),” World Archaeology 12 (1980): 137–152; Hervé Bocherens et al., “Isotopic Evidence for Diet and Subsistence Pattern of the Saint Cesaire I Neanderthal: Review and Use of a Multi-source Mixing Model,” Journal of Human Evolution 49 (2005): 71–87.

  70.  McBrearty and Brooks, “Revolution That Wasn’t,” 510–513; Klein, Human Career, 555–564.

  71.  Mellars, Neanderthal Legacy, 369–371; Ian Watts, “The Origin of Symbolic Culture,” in The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight, and Camilla Power (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 113–146.

  72.  See, for example, John J. Shea, “Middle Paleolithic Spear Point Technology,” in Projectile Technology, ed. Heidi Knecht (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 79–106.

  73.  Lombard, “Gripping Nature of Ochre,” 406–419.

  74.  Lyn Wadley, “Revisiting Cultural Modernity and the Role of Red Ochre in the Middle Stone Age,” in The Prehistory of Africa: Tracing the Lineage of Modern Man, ed. Himla Soodyall (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2006), 49–63.

  75.  J. Desmond Clark, “African and Asian Perspectives on the Origin of Modern Humans,” in The Origin of Modern Humans and the Impact of Chronometric Dating, ed. M. J. Aitken, C. B. Stringer, and P. A. Mellars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 148–178.

  76.  François Bordes, “Mousterian Cultures in France,” Science 134 (1961): 803–810.

  77.  Lewis R. Binford and Sally R. Binford, “A Preliminary Analysis of Functional Variability in the Mousterian of Levallois Facies,” American Anthropologist 68 (1966): 238–295.

  78.  Ongoing research on composite implements may eventually reveal greater complexity in the African technology, providing an additional contrast (other than the apparent lack of regional differentiation in artifact style) with that of the Neanderthals. For example, the alternative hafting locations (that is, end versus side) from southern Africa (recently reported in Villa et al., “Howiesons Poort and MSA III at Klasies River Main Site, Cave 1A”) may not be present in Eurasia.

  79.  See, for example, Francesco d’Errico, “The Invisible Frontier: A Multiple Species Model for the Origin of Behavioral Modernity,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 188–202.

  80.  A prominent critic of the perceived parallels between technology and language is Thomas Wynn, who observed that “the action sequences of tool-making and tool-use are organized and learned in a simple way. One action is tied to the preceding action, and long strings of such connections are learned by rote and repetition. This is very unlike the production of a sentence” (“Tools, Grammar and the Archaeology of Cognition,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 [1991]: 198). See also Thomas Wynn, “Handaxe Enigmas,” World Archaeology 27 (1995): 10–24. Wynn’s view may reflect an emphasis on simple technologies; I find it difficult to avoid parallels between language structure and the complex hierarchical organization of more recent machines and devices.

  81.  Coolidge and Wynn, “Working Memory.”.

  82.  Karen Emmorey, Sonya Mehta, and Thomas J. Grabowski, “The Neural Correlates of Sign Versus Word Production,” NeuroImage 36 (2007): 202–208.

  83.  Humans who lived 300,000 to 250,000 years ago (and perhaps much earlier) probably communicated a substantial amount of information with a wide range of sounds. Vocal communication among vervet monkeys provides a possible model. In a classic study, How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert S. Seyfarth reported that these highly social monkeys identify various predators with specific sounds (that is, vocal iconic symbols). Monkeys and apes also communicate with a variety of gestures, primarily using the hands and feet and sometimes employing objects. See Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2007).

  84.  Lieberman, Biology and Evolution of Language.

  85.  See, for example, Noble and Davidson, “Evolutionary Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour.” In a provocative paper, “The Archaeology of Perception: Traces of Depiction and Language,” Current Anthropology 30 (1989): 125–155, Iain Davidson and William Noble suggested that visual art was an essential stepping stone to language—rather than merely a byproduct or consequence of it. This thesis received little support from other archaeologists—most of whom seem to believe that language either preceded or accompanied the appearance of visual art—but it offers a parallel to many of the arguments presented here (for example, that interaction and feedback between brain and artifact—between internal and external mental representation—was a catalyst for the development of human cognitive faculties).

  86.  Dietrich Mania and Ursula Mania, “Deliberate Engravings on Bone Artefacts of Homo erectus,” Rock Art Research 5 (1988): 91–107; Klein, Human Career, 407–410.

  87.  Francesco d’Errico and April Nowell, “A New Look at the Berekhat Ram Figurine: Implications for the Origins of Symbolism,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10 (2000): 123–167.

  88.  Marian Vanhaeren et al., “Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Algeria and Israel,” Science 312 (2006): 1785–1788. Indirect evidence for the use of plant and/or animal materials for line extends back to the indications of hafting discussed earlier (that is, around 250,000 years ago).

  89.  Wadley, “What Is Cultural Modernity,” 208; Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d’Errico, “Aurignacian Ethno-linguistic Geography of Europe Revealed by Personal Ornaments,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (2006): 1105–1128.

  90.  Mellars, Neanderthal Legacy, 374–375; d’Errico, “Invisible Frontier,” 198–199. Personal ornaments are associated with Neanderthal skeletal remains in several occupation layers in southwestern Europe assigned to the “Chatelperronian” industry, but these may be cases where Middle Paleolithic artifacts and skeletal remains were mixed with overlying Upper Paleolithic artifacts by frost action. See, for example, Klein, Human Career, 748–750.

  91.  Christopher Henshilwood, “Fully Symbolic Sapiens Behaviour: Innovation in the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave, South Africa,” in Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans, ed. Paul Mellars et al. (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007), 123–132.

  92.  Clive Gamble, Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 181–202; Hoffecker, Prehistory of the North, 75–91.

  93.  Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic in Southwest Asia and Neighboring Regions,” in The Geography of Neandertals and Modern Humans in Europe and the Greater Mediterranean, ed. Ofer Bar-Yosef and David Pilbeam (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, 2000), 107–156.

  94.  Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic,” 187–190.

  95.  Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” 377–378.

  96.  d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music,” 39–48.

  97.  Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic,” 190–196.

4. The Upper Paleolithic as History

    1.  V. Gordon Childe, “Retrospect,” Antiquity 32 (1958): 70. See also V. Gordon Childe, The Dawn of European Civilization (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). Bruce G. Trigger notes that this book had been preceded by several syntheses of European prehistory in Britain, but that it was the “original and convincing manner in which Childe analysed and presented his data” that accounted for its impact (Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 37–40). See also Bruce G. Trigger, “Childe’s Relevance to the 1990s,” in The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe, ed. David R. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9–34. The essay begins with the observation that Childe, “although dead since 1957, remains the most renowned and widely read archaeologist of the 20th century.”.

    2.  Trigger, Gordon Childe, 91.

    3.  See, for example, V. Gordon Childe, “Races, Peoples, and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe,” History 18 (1933): 193–203.

    4.  V. Gordon Childe wrote that “food production … was an economic revolution.… It opened up a richer and more reliable supply of food.… Judging by the observed effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, a rapid increase of population would be the normal corollary of such a change” (New Light on the Most Ancient East: The Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory [London: Kegan Paul, 1934], 42). And regarding the rise of urban centers, he wrote “in response to the opportunities of livelihood created by the new economy an industrial proletariat multiplied as quickly as it did in England during the industrial revolution” (186). The concept of the “Industrial Revolution” was articulated in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1880 and 1881 by the elder Arnold Toynbee and later recalled and published by his students. See Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956). See also Kevin Greene, “V. Gordon Childe and the Vocabulary of Revolutionary Change,” Antiquity 73 (1999): 97–109.

    5.  Clive Gamble, Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10–16.

    6.  V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, 1936).

    7.  V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942).

    8.  Trigger, Gordon Childe, 17–19; V. Gordon Childe, Scotland Before the Scots (London: Methuen, 1946). In a personal recollection published in the early 1990s, Howard Kilbride-Jones wrote, “One must see everything in terms of Childe the exhibitionist.… I always had a feeling that Childe’s Marxism was an umbrella under which he sheltered in order to be different from the rest, meaning of course the Establishment” (“From Mr Howard Kilbride-Jones, 6 April 1992,” in Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe, ed. Harris, 135–139). Sally Green suggested the reverse—that Childe’s tongue-in-cheek comments were an umbrella under which he sheltered a sincere commitment to Marxism—in Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1981), 77. But his later writings make it clear that he saw little value in the way in which Marxist philosophy had been applied to archaeology in the Soviet Union.

    9.  Trigger, Gordon Childe, 124.

  10.  Ibid., 131. See also Trigger, “Childe’s Relevance to the 1990s,” 23. It should be noted, however, that Childe made no reference to R. G. Collingwood in his article “Retrospect,” which was published posthumously.

  11.  R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). This book was edited and published several years after Collingwood’s death.

  12.  Ibid., 217.

  13.  Trigger, Gordon Childe, 121.

  14.  V. Gordon Childe, History (London: Cobbett Press, 1947), 67–83. This book contains references to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and even Comrade Stalin.

  15.  V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (London: Watts, 1951), 1. In this book, Childe explicitly criticized the approach of Soviet archaeology—which had so impressed him in 1935—noting that it “assumes in advance precisely what archaeological facts have to prove.” (29). And he later wrote, “[A]t last I rid my mind of transcendental laws determining history and mechanical causes, whether economic or environmental, automatically shaping its course” (“Retrospect,” 73).

  16.  V. Gordon Childe, Society and Knowledge: The Growth of Human Traditions (New York: Harper, 1956). Although this book contains only one—somewhat critical—reference to the application of Marxist ideas to society and economics (102–103), Childe could not resist a comparison between “the Christian church under the Roman Empire [and] the Communist Party in the U.S.A.” in a discussion of groups within larger societies (101–102).

  17.  Ibid., 79.

  18.  Ibid., 124.

  19.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 215.

  20.  Ibid., 209.

  21.  Childe, Society and Knowledge, 1.

  22.  V. Gordon Childe, Piecing Together the Past: The Interpretation of Archaeological Data (New York: Praeger, 1956), 1. Both Collingwood and Childe were swimming against the current. As Daniel Lord Smail observes, modern historians managed to sidestep Darwin and preserve the biblical time frame of the human past: “[T]he sacred was deftly translated into a secular key: the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia, and the creation of man was reconfigured as the rise of civilization. Prehistory … was cantilevered outside the narrative buttresses that sustain the edifice of Western civilization” (On Deep History and the Brain [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], 4).

  23.  According to Childe, “[C]raft processes and products that archaeologists can observe can stand beside mathematical tablets and surgical papyri as genuine documents in the history of science” (“Retrospect,” 72).

  24.  Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94–102.

  25.  See, for example, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life, and Art (New York: Scribner, 1915); and Denis Peyrony, Élements de préhistoire (Ussel: Jacques Eyboulet, 1934).

  26.  The Upper Paleolithic was identified with the development of matrilineal clan society and the preceding Middle Paleolithic with the “promiscuous horde” of the Neanderthals. See, for example, P. P. Efimenko, Pervobytnoe obshchestvo, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1938).

  27.  John F. Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic of Northern Eurasia,” Evolutionary Anthropology 14 (2005): 196.

  28.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 215.

  29.  These dates reflect the application of a calibration curve to the radiocarbon chronology of the Upper Paleolithic. Past fluctuations in atmospheric radiocarbon produce variable results in age estimates of carbon samples, and the cosmogenic radionuclide peak of 40,000 years ago corresponds to especially high concentrations of 14C, which yields age estimates that are several thousand years younger than the calendrical scale.

  30.  Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic,” 195–196.

  31.  John F. Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14 (2007): 359–387.

  32.  Francesco d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Journal of World Prehistory 17 (2003): 1–70.

  33.  The comparison between EUP visual art and music (instruments) and EUP technology can be drawn only for the late EUP, because there is little evidence for any visual art or music making before 40,000 years ago, and this may be due entirely to sampling and preservation bias.

  34.  For a discussion of how visual art may be related to ideas about space, time, and light in the postmedieval world, see Leonard Shlain’s interesting book Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: Morrow, 1991).

  35.  This is a complex issue long discussed by historians of technology as well as others. See, for example, Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1914); and Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

  36.  See, for example, Philip Allsworth-Jones, “The Szeletian and the Stratigraphic Succession in Central Europe and Adjacent Areas: Main Trends, Recent Results, and Problems for Resolution,” in The Emergence of Modern Humans: An Archaeological Perspective, ed. Paul Mellars (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 160–242.

  37.  John F. Hoffecker, “The Spread of Modern Humans in Europe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 16040–16045.

  38.  Paul Mellars, “Going East: New Genetic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Modern Human Colonization of Eurasia,” Science 313 (2006): 796–800. Although slightly dated now, the best general account of the global dispersal of modern humans remains Brian Fagan, The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). For a more current overview, see Alice Roberts, The Incredible Human Journey: The Story of How We Colonised the Planet (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).

  39.  Rhys Jones, “East of Wallace’s Line: Issues and Problems in the Colonisation of the Australian Continent,” in The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans, ed. Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 743–782; Philip J. Hapgood and Natalie R. Franklin, “The Revolution That Didn’t Arrive: A Review of Pleistocene Sahul,” Journal of Human Evolution 55 (2008): 187–222. Given the origins of the Australian EUP (that is, watercraft), according to Hapgood and Franklin, the absence of earlier evidence for coastal marine resource use is likely due to rising sea levels, which probably inundated the earlier sites (203).

  40.  Hapgood and Franklin, “Revolution That Didn’t Arrive,” 192–201.

  41.  Ibid., 207–211. Bone implements at Bone Cave (Tasmania) were recovered in deposits that yielded dates as early 33,385 ± 554 calibrated radiocarbon years ago, but otherwise are unknown in the Australian EUP. It should be noted that bone implements are scarce in the oldest Upper Paleolithic assemblages of the Near East and Europe, despite their earlier presence in the African Middle Stone Age.

  42.  Anthony E. Marks and C. Reid Ferring, “The Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant,” in The Early Upper Paleolithic: Evidence from Europe and the Near East, ed. John F. Hoffecker and Cornelia A. Wolf (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988), 43–72; Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic in Southwest Asia and Neighboring Regions,” in The Geography of Neandertals and Modern Humans in Europe and the Greater Mediterranean, ed. Ofer Bar-Yosef and David Pilbeam (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 2000), 107–156. Bar-Yosef describes the transformation of stone industry in the Levant as a “technological revolution” (142–143).

  43.  Steven L. Kuhn et al., “The Early Upper Paleolithic Occupations at Üçağizli Cave (Hatay, Turkey),” Journal of Human Evolution 56 (2009): 87–113.

  44.  Miryam Bar-Mathews and Avner Ayalon, “Climatic Conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean During the Last Glacial (60–10 ky) and Their Relations to the Upper Palaeolithic in the Levant as Inferred from Oxygen and Carbon Isotope Systematics of Cave Deposits,” in More Than Meets the Eye: Studies on Upper Palaeolithic Diversity in the Near East, ed. A. Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003), 13–18.

  45.  See, for example, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976); and Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  46.  Ted Goebel, “The Pleistocene Colonization of Siberia and Peopling of the Americas: An Ecological Approach,” Evolutionary Anthropology 8 (1999): 208–227.

  47.  Erik Trinkaus, “Neanderthal Limb Proportions and Cold Adaptation,” in Aspects of Human Evolution, ed. Chris Stringer (London: Taylor & Francis, 1981), 187–224; Trenton W. Holliday, “Brachial and Crural Indices of European Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 36 (1999): 549–566.

  48.  John F. Hoffecker, A Prehistory of the North (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 75–82.

  49.  Hoffecker, “Spread of Modern Humans in Europe,” 16044.

  50.  A new statistical approach has been applied to the classification of isolated dental remains from these sites, concluding that most of them can probably be assigned to modern humans. See Shara E. Bailey, Timothy D. Weaver, and Jean-Jacques Hublin, “Who Made the Aurignacian and Other Early Upper Paleolithic Industries?” Journal of Human Evolution 57 (2009): 11–26.

  51.  Steven L. Kuhn and Amilcare Bietti, “The Late Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic in Italy,” in Geography of Neandertals and Modern Humans in Europe and the Greater Mediterranean, ed. Bar-Yosef and Pilbeam, 49–76.

  52.  Vance T. Holliday et al., “Geoarchaeology of the Kostenki–Borshchevo Sites, Don River Valley, Russia,” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 22 (2007): 181–228; John F. Hoffecker et al., “From the Bay of Naples to the River Don: The Campanian Ignimbrite Eruption and the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Human Evolution 55 (2008): 858–870.

  53.  Richard G. Klein, Man and Culture in the Late Pleistocene: A Case Study (San Francisco: Chandler, 1969), 29–31.

  54.  John F. Hoffecker et al., “Evidence for Kill-Butchery Events of Early Upper PaleolithicAge at Kostenki, Russia,” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010): 1073–1089.

  55.  Francesco G. Fedele, Biagio Giaccio, and Irka Hajdas, “Timescales and Cultural Processes at 40,000 bp in the Light of the Campanian Ignimbrite Eruption, Western Eurasia,” Journal of Human Evolution 55 (2008): 834–857.

  56.  Paola Villa, François Bon, and Jean-Christophe Castel, “Fuel, Fire and Fireplaces in the Palaeolithic of Western Europe,” Review of Archaeology 23 (2002): 33–42.

  57.  The earliest known eyed needle in eastern Europe dates to about 40,000 years ago and was recovered from Mezmaiskaya Cave (Russia) in the northwestern Caucasus. See Liubov V. Golovanova et al., “Significance of Ecological Factors in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition,” Current Anthropology 51 (2010): 655–691.

  58.  Heidi Knecht, “Splits and Wedges: The Techniques and Technology of Early Aurignacian Antler Working,” in Before Lascaux: The Complex Record of the Early Upper Paleolithic, ed. Heidi Knecht, Ann Pike-Tay, and Randall White (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 1993), 137–162.

  59.  Nicholas J. Conard, “Palaeolithic Ivory Sculptures from Southwestern Germany and the Origins of Figurative Art,” Nature 426 (2003): 830–832, and “A Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 459 (2009): 248–252.

  60.  d’Errico et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music,” 39–48.

  61.  This burial, which contained the poorly preserved remains of a child, was discovered by A. N. Rogachev at Kostenki 15 in 1952 and has since been dated by radiocarbon to about 30,000 calibrated years ago. Several years later, Rogachev excavated another burial in a later EUP level at Kostenki 14, but the dating of this skeleton has been problematic—it yielded several younger radiocarbon dates in recent years. See A. N. Rogachev, “Mnogosloinye Stoyanki Kostenkovsko-Borshevskogo raiona na Donu i Problema Razvitiya Kul’tury v Epokhy Verkhnego Paleolita na Russkoi Ravnine,” Materialy i Issledovaniya po Arkheologii SSSR 59 (1957): 9–134; and Klein, Man and Culture in the Late Pleistocene, 94–96.

  62.  Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973).

  63.  The most famous example of grave offerings from a Neanderthal burial is the evidence of flowers, based on concentrations of preserved pollen, reported from Shanidar Cave (Iraq) by Ralph S. Solecki, Shanidar, the First Flower People (New York: Knopf, 1971). It now appears likely, however, that the pollen concentrations are derived from flower heads brought into the cave by burrowing rodents. See Jeffrey D. Sommer, “The Shanidar IV ‘Flower Burial’: A Re-evaluation of Neanderthal Burial Ritual,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9 (1999): 127–129.

  64.  Childe was not a Paleolithic specialist, but he did discuss early prehistory briefly in several books. His final comments on the Gravettian would seem to be in the posthumously published V. Gordon Childe, The Prehistory of European Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958).

  65.  Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jiř Svoboda, Vojen Ložek, and Emanuel Vlček, Hunters Between East and West: The Paleolithic of Moravia (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), 131–170.

  66.  Goebel, “Pleistocene Colonization of Siberia and Peopling of the Americas,” 216–218.

  67.  See, for example, Lawrence G. Straus, “The Upper Paleolithic of Europe: An Overview,” Evolutionary Anthropology 4 (1995): 4–16.

  68.  Wendell H. Oswalt, The Anthropological Analysis of Food-Getting Technology (New York: Wiley, 1976).

  69.  Hoffecker, Prehistory of the North, 91–94.

  70.  See, for example, Childe, Man Makes Himself, 257–270. This is the final chapter of the book: “The Acceleration and Retardation of Progress.”.

  71.  See, for example, David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1999).

  72.  John F. Hoffecker, “The Eastern Gravettian ‘Kostenki Culture’ as an Arctic Adaptation,” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, n.s., 2 (2002): 115–136.

  73.  Michael P. Richards et al., “Stable Isotope Evidence for Increasing Dietary Breadth in the European Mid-Upper Paleolithic,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 6528–6532.

  74.  Olga Soffer et al., “Palaeolithic Perishables Made Permanent,” Antiquity 74 (2000): 812–821; Zbigniew M. Bochenski et al., “Fowling During the Gravettian: The Avifauna of Pavlov I, Czech Republic,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009): 2655–2665.

  75.  Pawel Valde-Nowak, Adam Nadachowski, and Mieczyslaw Wolsan, “Upper Palaeolithic Boomerang Made of a Mammoth Tusk in South Poland,” Nature 329 (1987): 436–438.

  76.  Hoffecker, “Eastern Gravettian ‘Kostenki Culture’ as an Arctic Adaptation,” 122–123.

  77.  Pamela P. Vandiver et al., “The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Věstonice, Czechoslovakia,” Science 246 (1989): 1002–1008.

  78.  Hoffecker, “Eastern Gravettian ‘Kostenki Culture’ as an Arctic Adaptation,” 120–123.

  79.  Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  80.  Childe, Man Makes Himself, 261–270.

  81.  Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 404–414.

  82.  Gamble, Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe, 324–331.

  83.  Pavel Dolukhanov, Dmitry Sokoloff, and Anvar Shukurov, “Radiocarbon Chronology of Upper Palaeolithic Sites in Eastern Europe at Improved Resolution,” Journal of Archaeological Science 28 (2001): 699–712; Kelly E. Graf, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Evaluating the Radiocarbon Chronology of the Middle and Late Upper Paleolithic in the Enisei River Valley, South-Central Siberia,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009): 694–707.

  84.  Hoffecker, Prehistory of the North, 94–95.

  85.  Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic,” 193–195.

  86.  Aaron Jonas Stutz, Natalie D. Munro, and Guy Bar-Oz, “Increasing the Resolution of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in the Southern Levantine Epipaleolithic (19–12 ka),” Journal of Human Evolution 56 (2009): 294–306.

  87.  According to Childe, “The bow … is perhaps the first engine man devised. The motive power is, indeed, just human muscular energy, but in the tension of the bow energy gradually expended in bending it is accumulated so as to be released all at once and concentrated in dispatching the arrow. The spear-thrower ingeniously augments the energy a man’s arm can impart to a missile on the principle of the lever” (Man Makes Himself, 67).

  88.  Pierre Cattelain, “Un crochet de propulseur solutréen de la grotte de Combe-Saunière 1 (Dordogne),” Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 86 (1989): 213–216.

  89.  Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 20–24.

  90.  Grahame Clark, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (London: Methuen, 1952), 30–31.

  91.  I. G. Pidoplichko, Mezhirichskie zhilishcha iz Kostei Mamonta (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1976), 164–167; Hoffecker, “Innovation and Technological Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic,” 194–195.

  92.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Penguin, 1968), 81.

  93.  Elisabetta Boaretto et al., “Radiocarbon Dating of Charcoal and Bone Collagen Associated with Early Pottery at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province, China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 9595–9600.

  94.  Charles T. Keally, Yasuhiro Taniguchi, and Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, “Understanding the Beginnings of Pottery Technology in Japan and Neighboring East Asia,” Review of Archaeology 24 (2003): 3–14.

  95.  Ibid., 5.

  96.  New evidence for EUP dog domestication has been reported in Mietje Germonpré et al., “Fossil Dogs and Wolves from Palaeolithic Sites in Belgium, the Ukraine, and Russia: Osteometry, Ancient DNA, and Stable Isotopes,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009): 473–490.

  97.  Norbert Benecke, “Studies on Early Dog Remains from Northern Europe,” Journal of Archaeological Science 14 (1987): 31–49; Mikhail V. Sablin and Gennady A. Khlopachev, “The Earliest Ice Age Dogs: Evidence from Eliseevichi I,” Current Anthropology 43 (2002): 795–799.

  98.  Peter Savolainen et al., “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin for Domesticated Dogs,” Science 298 (2002): 1610–1613.

  99.  Francesco d’Errico, “Palaeolithic Origins of Artificial Memory Systems: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), 19–50.

100. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).

101. d’Errico, “Palaeolithic Origins of Artificial Memory Systems,” 43.

102. I. G. Pidoplichko, Pozdnepaleoliticheskie zhilishcha iz kostei mamonta na Ukraine (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1969), and Mezhirichskie zhilishcha; Zoya A. Abramova, “Two Examples of Terminal Paleolithic Adaptations,” in From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic–Paleo-Indian Adaptations, ed. Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 85–100; John F. Hoffecker, Desolate Landscapes: Ice-Age Settlement in Eastern Europe (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 206–232.

103. James R. Sackett, “The Neuvic Group: Upper Paleolithic Open-Air Sites in the Perigord,” in Upper Pleistocene Prehistory of Western Eurasia, ed. Harold L. Dibble and Anna Montet-White (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1988), 61–84.

104. Hoffecker, “Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record,” 380–381.

105. An exception is the hexagonal cell design of a honeybee comb. See, for example, Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 97, fig. 5–16.

106. Janusz K. Kozlowski, “The Gravettian in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Advances in World Archaeology, ed. Fred Wendorf and Angela E. Close (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1986), 5:131–200; Svoboda, Ložek, and Vlček, Hunters Between East and West, 188–194.

5. Mindscapes of the Postglacial Epoch

    1.  The most impressive example of landscape modification in the Upper Paleolithic may be the introduction of one or more small mammals into New Ireland in the southwestern Pacific about 20,000 years ago. See Christopher Gosden, Social Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 25.

    2.  André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 328–346.

    3.  Peter Gathercole, “Childe’s Revolutions,” in Archaeology: The Key Concepts, ed. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 35–41.

    4.  Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 190.

    5.  See, especially, Jan Assmann, The Mind of Ancient Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 46–49.

    6.  John D. Kasarda, “The Structural Implications of Social System Size: A Three-Level Analysis,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 19–28, cited in the context of the rise of Sumerian civilization in Guillermo Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 139.

    7.  Kwang-Chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 6th ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 103–104; Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India, and China (London: Routledge, 1999).

    8.  The larger chiefdoms of Oceania are examples of large societies—perhaps tens of thousands of people—that did not become nation-states. See Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 311–313.

    9.  Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London: Routledge, 1989), 19.

  10.  See, for example, Robert McC. Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago: Aldine, 1966). V. Gordon Childe enumerated ten criteria of civilizations (for example, monumental public buildings, writing) in “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21 (1950): 3–17. Childe also observed that “all measurement involves abstract thinking. In measuring lengths of stuffs you ignore their materials, colours, patterns, textures, and so on, to concentrate on length” (Man Makes Himself [London: Watts, 1936], 219).

  11.  According to Assmann, “The monumental tombs of Egypt are not graves in any contemporary sense. Their significance in Egyptian civilization is comparable to that which we attach to art and literature” (Mind of Ancient Egypt, 67).

  12.  Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: Norton, 2009).

  13.  The limited pace of invention during ancient times—compared with both the preceding and later epochs—has been discussed by many, including Childe, Man Makes Himself, 257–270; and Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 234–262. See also M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, 2nd ed., updated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Robert McC. Adams, Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 37–46; and Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19–30.

  14.  Adams, Paths of Fire, 41.

  15.  In recent decades, historians of technology have modified the picture of stagnation in late antiquity—especially for the late Roman period—noting that innovations and applications of novel technologies (particularly water wheels) were more common than previously supposed. See, for example, Kevin Greene, “Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World: M. I. Finley Reconsidered,” Economic History Review, n.s., 53 (2000): 29–59; and Luke Lavan, “Explaining Technological Change: Innovation, Stagnation, Recession and Replacement,” in Technology in Transition, A.D. 300–650, ed. Luke Lavan, Enrico Zanini, and Alexander Sarantis (Leiden: Brill, 2007), xv–xl.

  16.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 234. See also Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17–22. Rappaport observed that “problems set by Alternatives arise, as much or more from the ordering of symbols through grammar … [which] makes the conception of alternatives virtually ineluctable” (17).

  17.  Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 44–49.

  18.  Dolores R. Piperno et al., “Processing of Wild Cereal Grains in the Upper Palaeolithic Revealed by Starch Grain Analysis,” Nature 430 (2005): 670–673. The authors note ethnographic examples of baking ovens similar to the feature discovered at Ohalo II. Devices and procedures for the preparation of food have been termed “external digestion” and are another example of humans redesigning themselves as organisms with technology. See Martin Jones, “Moving North: Archaeobotanical Evidence for Plant Diet in Middle and Upper Paleolithic Europe,” in The Evolution of Hominin Diets: Integrating Approaches to the Study of Palaeolithic Subsistence, ed. Jean-Jacques Hublin and Michael P. Richards (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 171–180.

  19.  Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture,” Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998): 173.

  20.  Jean Perrot, “Le gisement natoufien de Mallaha (Eynan), Israel,” L’Anthropologie 70 (1966): 437–484; Gordon C. Hillman, “Late Pleistocene Changes in Wild Plant Foods Available to Hunter-Gatherers of the Northern Fertile Crescent: Possible Preludes to Cereal Cultivation,” in The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, ed. David R. Harris (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 159–203. For a widely accessible account of the Natufian and the transition to sedentary life with an emphasis on the role of climate change, see Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 79–125.

  21.  A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hillman, and A. J. Legge, Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); Bar-Yosef, “Natufian Culture in the Levant,” 172–174; Bellwood, First Farmers, 49–54.

  22.  Gordon C. Hillman and M. Stuart Davies, “Measured Domestication Rates in Wild Wheat and Barley Under Primitive Cultivation and Their Archaeological Implications,” Journal of World Prehistory 4 (1990): 157–222.

  23.  Bellwood, First Farmers, 59–66.

  24.  Robert McC. Adams and Hans J. Nissen, The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Guillermo Algaze, The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  25.  Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World, 175.

  26.  See the classic Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Sumer did not become a unified nation-state for another 700 years, when the southern cities were unified under Lugal-zagesi in 2340 B.C.E. See Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1992).

  27.  Frank Hole, “Environmental Instabilities and Urban Origins,” in Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East: The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity, ed. Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman (Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1994), 121–143. See also Fagan, Long Summer, 134–139. Algaze wrote, “Early Near Eastern villagers domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans” (Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 129).

  28.  Kramer, Sumerians, 77–88; Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World, 166–169.

  29.  Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 135–137.

  30.  Ibid., 66–68; Kramer, Sumerians, 104. A model sailboat was recovered from Eridu.

  31.  V. Gordon Childe, “Wheeled Vehicles,” in A History of Technology, vol. 1, From Early Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, ed. Charles Singer, Eric J. Holmyard, and A. R. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 716–729; Kramer, Sumerians, 104–105; L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), 57–58; Glyn Daniel, The First Civilizations: The Archaeology of Their Origins (New York: Crowell, 1968), 72–73; Stuart Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).

  32.  The true circle itself is not found in the natural world, and is a concept generated by the modern human mind, according to Ernest Zebrowski, A History of the Circle: Mathematical Reasoning and the Physical Universe (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

  33.  Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 131.

  34.  Kramer, Sumerians, 104; Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 82–83.

  35.  My own view is that the engineering of the public buildings is far outweighed in originality and significance by the innovations in information technology and applications of animal and wind power in agriculture and transportation.

  36.  Kramer, Sumerians, 135–144.

  37.  I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 116–138. See also Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 194–198.

  38.  Kramer, Sumerians, 91; Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World, 74–75.

  39.  Kemp, Ancient Egypt, 31–35. For a comparison of Sumer and Egypt, see Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World.

  40.  Chang, Archaeology of Ancient China, 309–331. Large structures were constructed during the Shang dynasty, however, including the palace at Erh-li-t’ou and the subterranean royal tombs at An-yang. Regarding the foundation of the state in China, Maisels wrote: “The original pre-state solidarity was the highly potent solidarity of the clan.… Social divisions were enhanced with the state, but as its advent was an incremental process and not a revolutionary one” (Early Civilizations of the Old World, 339–340).

  41.  Coe, Maya, 41–55.

  42.  Ibid., 103–104.

  43.  Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980).

  44.  R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 232.

  45.  Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of History (New York: Basic Books, 1981). See also Assmann, Mind of Ancient Egypt, 13–17.

  46.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 209.

  47.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 1:16. Edmund Leach translated the original French text as “machines for the suppression of time” (Claude Lévi-Strauss [New York: Viking Press, 1970], 125).

  48.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 14–17; Butterfield, Origins of History, 22–79.

  49.  Assmann, Mind of Ancient Egypt, 20–21. Many aspects of Egyptian technology are described in A. Lucas and J. R. Harris, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 4th ed. (London: Arnold, 1962).

  50.  The sed festival was performed when the pharaoh reached the thirtieth year of his reign. According to Assmann, “Djoser’s casting of the ritual structures in stone rather than the transient materials previously employed served the purpose of enabling the king to continue the sed festival into all eternity” (Mind of Ancient Egypt, 56).

  51.  Assmann wrote, “Where ritual was concerned … [e]verything hinged on precise reiteration. Maximum care was taken to prevent deviation and improvisation” (ibid., 71). The irony of these observations is that historians traditionally have viewed the invention of writing as the beginning of history (describing preliterate societies as “people without history”), while it would seem that the Egyptians used writing to help suppress history.

  52.  Assmann noted that “the division into nomes represented a thoroughgoing reorganization of the territory, undertaken probably as late as the reign of Djoser (2687–2667 B.C.). There is thus no continuity between the rival chiefdoms of the Naqada Period and the nomes of the Old Kingdom. Indeed, the structures that had evolved before the advent of the state were ruthlessly suppressed” (ibid., 47).

  53.  According to Assmann, “The police state character of the Middle Kingdom is the inevitable institutional expression of a state that styles itself primarily as a bulwark against chaos, as a bastion of a civilization built upon law, order, and justice. Such a state will inevitably develop organs of control, surveillance, and punishment that curtail individual freedom of movement” (ibid., 139).

  54.  Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World, 185; Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 128.

  55.  de Camp, Ancient Engineers, 57–82; John McLeish, The Story of Numbers: How Mathematics Shaped Civilization (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991), 32–37; David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 13–20. See also Roux, Ancient Iraq, 357–366.

  56.  J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 55–82; Daniel R. Headrick, Technology: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–50. No fewer than three revolutions in military technology took place before 500 B.C.E., and all of them seem to have emerged from the uncivilized fringe. The first was the “chariot revolution” at about 1700 B.C.E., which overran both Mesopotamia and Egypt and eventually hit China.

  57.  For a recent discussion of the Hellenistic “military revolution,” see S. Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–76. On mechanical technology, see Andrew I. Wilson, “Machines in Greek and Roman Technology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 336–366.

  58.  de Camp, Ancient Engineers, 83–171; Geoffrey Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973); J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Alan Hirshfeld, Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes (New York: Walker, 2009). One of the most spectacular examples of Hellenistic technology is a device known as the Antikythera Mechanism, which was recovered from a sunken ship in the Aegean Sea in 1900 and is thought to date to the mid-first century B.C.E. at the latest. For a discussion of recent research on this artifact, described as a mechanical “planetarium,” and a depiction of a working model, see Robert Hannah, “Timekeeping,” in Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. Oleson, 744–746. The attribution of the crank to Hellenistic engineers is problematic, however, according to Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 103–115. For the link between Archimedes and Galileo, see Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology (New York: Norton, 1995), 83–84.

  59.  de Camp, Ancient Engineers, 130–138; Cardwell, Norton History of Technology, 20–24. Fernand Braudel discussed Alexandrian Egypt as an abortive industrial revolution in The Perspective of the World, vol. 3 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 543–544.

  60.  See, for example, Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (New York: Viking Press, 1999), 372–388.

  61.  Chang concluded that “no significantly new technological invention has been archaeologically documented from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age.… The emergence of Bronze Age civilizations in China was not accompanied … by a significant use of metal farming implements, irrigation networks, any use of draft animals, or the use of the plough” (Archaeology of Ancient China, 364).

  62.  Kwang-Chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 350–357; Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 15–23; Headrick, Technology, 52–53.

  63.  Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973), 23–34.

  64.  Joseph Needham, The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China (Cambridge: Heffer, 1964); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24–62; Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 1–6.

  65.  Joseph Needham, Science in Traditional China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See also Temple, Genius of China, 103–110, which depicts a model of Su Sung’s water-powered mechanical clock of 1092 (fig. 79). For a description of Chinese nautical technology, including watertight compartments and a magnetic compass, see Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilization in China, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  66.  Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, 91–110. The Chinese Communist Party seized control of the nation in 1949—after years of foreign invasion and civil war—in much the same manner as had earlier dynasties, and it explicitly emulated the Qin dynasty in expanding the power and reach of the central government in concert with a state ideology. In recent decades, the Chinese leaders have loosened control of the economy to permit more rapid growth and have followed (less explicitly) the course of other dynasties like the Zhou and Han that exerted less rigid control over the provinces and cities.

  67.  McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 44–50; Mokyr, Lever of Riches, 231–238; Headrick, Technology, 72–73.

  68.  Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, 1976), 29–58; Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 104–145.

  69.  McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 63–116; Mokyr, Lever of Riches, 231–238; David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1999), 29–59.

  70.  Ernst Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept of the Future from the Early Fathers to Teilhard de Chardin, trans. Heinz G. Frank (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1966); Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). See also Mokyr, Lever of Riches, 201–208.

  71.  Cardwell describes the attitude toward manual labor and technical matters in Norton History of Technology, 37. See also Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 263–267. For a discussion of the Judeo-Christian construction of time, see J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 20–29. Butterfield considers the importance of Saint Augustine’s writings on time and history in Origins of History, 180–184.

  72.  White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 39–78; Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 32–43; Headrick, Technology, 55–58.

  73.  Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 234–262. Although Mumford expressed skepticism about the decline of slavery as a significant factor in accelerated technological innovation, Gimpel noted a general correlation between the downward trend in slavery and the increase in water power in Medieval Machine, 10.

  74.  Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World, 16–26. Headrick described the Roman hydropower complex at Barbegal in France (constructed in 310 C.E.), which comprised sixteen overshot wheels and was capable of grinding 3 tons of grain an hour, in Technology, 49–50.

  75.  White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 79–85; Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 1–24.

  76.  Pacey, Technology in World Civilization, 10–12.

  77.  White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 84–89; Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 24–27. See also Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 112–118. Windmills were so common by the last decade of the twelfth century that they were taxed by Pope Celestine III.

  78.  Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 132–134; David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 53–66.

  79.  Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 35–45.

  80.  Landes, Revolution in Time, 57.

  81.  Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 126; Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 46–47.

  82.  Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 199–236. For an accessible account of this period, see Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Knopf, 1978).

  83.  Cardwell, Norton History of Technology, 49–56.

  84.  Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 385–397; McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 79–143.

  85.  Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 402–415.

  86.  Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 46.

  87.  See, for example, Cardwell, Norton History of Technology, 75–101. Contributions came from other parts of Europe as well, most notably from Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) in Poland.

  88.  Gimpel, Medieval Machine, 149.

  89.  Bury, Idea of Progress, 50–63.

  90.  For a brief but accessible overview, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983), 626–652.

  91.  William J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives (London: Macmillan, 1911). For a readable account of the European encounter with the native Australians, see Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

  92.  Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Crowell, 1968), 149–179; Robert L. Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 6–10.

  93.  See, for example, Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory, 80–107; and Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111–114.

  94.  Kelly, Foraging Spectrum.

  95.  Peter Hiscock concluded that “economic, social, and ideological change was not restricted to the historical period or even recent millennia, but occurred throughout Australian pre-history.… [T]here were ongoing modifications to foraging practices, technology, settlement and territoriality, and to social practices and the nature of cosmology and belief” (Archaeology of Ancient Australia [London: Routledge, 2008], 284–285). See also Harry Lourandos, Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  96.  For example, Wendell H. Oswalt observed that the Aranda (Arunta), often considered the most technologically simple of the native Australian groups, manufactured a throwing board spear composed of nine “techno-units,” or components, as well as untended facility in the form of an emu pit trap of four components (An Anthropological Analysis of Food-Getting Technology [New York: Wiley, 1976], 236–237).

  97.  Robert McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996).

6. The Vision Animal

    1.  Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971);Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: Norton, 2009), 5–10.

    2.  Hölldobler and Wilson, Super-Organism, 408–467.

    3.  The eusocial rodents include the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) and the Damaraland mole-rat (Cryptomys damarensis). See J. U. M. Jarvis, “Eusociality in a Mammal: Cooperative Breeding in Naked Mole-Rat Colonies,” Science 212 (1981): 571–573; and M. Andersson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Annual Reviews of Ecological Systems 15 (1984): 165–189.

    4.  See, for example, George Gaylord Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 177–179; and Niles Eldredge, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 51–53.

    5.  See, for example, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: Braziller, 1968). The study of complex biological systems is termed “bio-cybernetics.”.

    6.  Hölldobler and Wilson, Super-Organism, 4–13. See also Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 358–361.

    7.  R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 88–93; Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Crowell, 1968), 80–141.

    8.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 209.

    9.  Bruce G. Trigger, “Childe’s Relevance to the 1990s,” in The Archaeology of V. Gordon Childe, ed. David R. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9–27.

  10.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 190–204.

  11.  Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck, trans. Lewis White Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 12.

  12.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 97. Concerning the collective and cumulative character of knowledge, Kant wrote that “a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities. Since Nature has set only a short period for his life, she needs a perhaps unreckonable series of generations, each of which passes its own enlightenment to its successor in order finally to bring the seeds of enlightenment to that degree of development in our race which is completely suitable to Nature’s purpose” (“Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” trans. Beck, in On History, 13).

  13.  Kant’s view of history was presented in his short essay “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), published in Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitung and reprinted in Kant, On History, 11–26. Kant was by no means certain that progress would continue; he suggested that future progress might be obliterated by “barbarous devastation,” which seemed to be an eerie forecast of the massive military–industrial conflicts of the twentieth century.

  14.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 59. Hegel’s distinction between history and Nature was based on an erroneous view of the latter as static.

  15.  Ibid., 30.

  16.  Collingwood, Idea of History, 113–122.

  17.  William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63–143.

  18.  Mary Shelley described the genesis of her novel in the well-known author’s introduction to Frankenstein (New York: Random House, 1993), xiii–xxi.

  19.  Ibid., xix.

  20.  Robert Hannah, “Timekeeping,” in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 744–746; Donald Cardwell, The Norton History of Technology (New York: Norton, 1995), 420–422.

  21.  Margaret A. Boden, Computer Models of Mind: Computational Approaches in Theoretical Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).

  22.  Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433–460. Turing’s criterion for AI has long been referred to as the “Turing test.”.

  23.  Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005), 136. See also Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking Press, 1999).

  24.  K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Books, 1986).

  25.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 299–367.

  26.  George B. Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 211–228.