Prehistory of the Mind [Paperback]

Steven Mithen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 1998

'An accessible, very well written, provocative and most valuable book' Lewis Wolpert, Observer How do our minds work? When did language and religious beliefs first emerge? Why was there a cultural explosion of art and creativity with the arrival of modern humans? This ground-breaking book brings the insight of archaeology to our understanding of the development and history of the human mind, combining them with ideas from evolutionary psychology in a brilliant and provocative synthesis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Try an experiment: take a passenger along on a brief car trip--a jaunt to the supermarket, say. Have a nice conversation while you're driving, and take a scenic route. Now, the next day, try to reconstruct the details of both the conversation and the trip. Chances are, unless something unusual happened along the way, that your memory of both will be indistinct, for we tend to forget the mundane--an example of what the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls "rolling consciousness with swift memory loss."

Steven Mithen, an archaeologist with an interest in psychology, believes that just such a consciousness obtained among early humans when they went foraging for food or made tools. The evolution of higher, more memory-laden consciousness, he continues, occurred only as a result of a cognitive trick that doubtless involved some trial and error. The trick, simply put, was to guess what the social behavior of some member of one's social group might be in a given circumstance--to step outside one's own mind, in other words, and enter another's. This guesswork underlies the famed cave paintings of Altamira, an attempt to predict the behavior of migratory animals. It underlies as well another experiment: the development of agriculture, with the requisite predicting of how plants and animals might behave under a wide range of conditions.

Mithen's reconstruction of the ancestral human mind, laid out in a clear and accessible narrative, is a fine intellectual adventure. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Mithen (archaeology, Univ. of Reading) here speculates on the origin of the human mind. Viewing the past six million years as a four-act drama performed with shadowy lighting and insufficient props, Mithen suggests that the precursor of our modern mind was characterized by a general intelligence supplemented by specialized modules for social intelligence, natural history, and technology. Once these formerly independent modules began to communicate with one another, art, religion, and agriculture became possible. Mithen skillfully integrates the ideas of evolutionary psychologists with archaeological evidence and studies on primate behavior to create a plausible, albeit speculative, theory of mental evolution. For academic and special collections.?Laurie Bartolini, Legislative Research, Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix Paperbacks (May 4, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 075380204X
• ISBN-13: 978-0753802045
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #223,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The archaeology book of the 1990s, September 5, 1999

By 

Trevor Watkins (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (Paperback)

I read The Prehistory of the Mind when it first came out, and my copy has now been read several times. As a prehistoric archaeologist, I have found this the most exciting and richly stimulating book on archaeology that I have read during the 1990s. Steve Mithen brings together new ideas from evolutionary and developmental psychology, and produces a (controversial) theory of the evolution of the human mind. The great value of his book is that Mithen sets a theoretical sequence generalised from the work of the evolutionary psychologists into the context of the archaeological evidence, from the earliest hominids through to the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens. He seeks to relate the mental capabilities of our hominid ancestors to the ways in which they made and used stone tools. His unfolding of the evolved abilities of the modern human mind against the archaeology, art, ritual human burials etc of the European upper palaeolithic period of 40,000 to 30,000 years ago provides a convincing and at last scientific theory to underpin the idea of the 'upper palaeolithic revolution' that a number of archaeologists and anthropologists have been talking about for some years. I think that this book will prove to have a decisive influence on the development of archaeological theory, and that it will inspire archaeologists to do a lot of thinking in quite new directions, seeking to derive much more information about the mental, psychological, cultural and social behaviour of prehistoric peoples from traditional archaeological data.

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Metaphorical melange, May 1, 2002

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (Hardcover)

Mithen makes a valiant effort to establish the evolutionary roots of human intelligence. It's a complicated task, with so little physical evidence to support his endeavour. Still, he uses what there is with commendable ability. In presenting the development of intelligence, he falls back on three metaphorical images - the Swiss Army Knife, cathedral architecture and a dramatic play. The Swiss Army knife is a collection of specialized tools, each applied without relation to the others. You don't decork a wine bottle while trimming your fingernails. The cathedral is comprised of a central nave with connecting chapels. The chapels only connect to each other as intelligence develops. The drama is the history of hominid evolution, vague and obscure in the beginning, growing more discernible with more fossil evidence.

As with most cognitive studies, Mithen's book summarizes what is known of the similarity of chimpanzee [our nearest relative] intellect and abilities in contrast with our own. As do many of his colleagues, he finds our primate cousins lacking in all but minimal skills. With the chimpanzees thus disposed of, he moves to examine the hominid record. This is the great strength of this work. Instead of the usual tactic of portraying what is known of today's human intellect and projecting backward, Mithen starts at the beginnings of human evolution to carry his argument forward. Along the way he utilizes anthropology, morphological studies, even climate and geography. He uses evidence well, assuming little and carefully building the model. Key points in the narrative are two periods of hominid brain enlargement, which he uses to enhance his model of special "intelligences."

With the earliest hominids having only a Swiss Army knife array of mental tools, each segment of intelligence had to develop independent of the others. According to Mithen, this situation led to each "tool" building a separate "chapel" in the mind. Based on a central "nave" of "general" intelligence - keeping the body going, food gathering, sex - new intelligences would arise around it. These new intelligences are technical, natural, social and linguistic. Each operated independently of the others, so that tool-making enhanced "technical" intelligence, while learning about bird migration or fruiting seasons developed "natural" intelligence. The Swiss Army knife aspect prevented these intelligences from interacting until the emergence of Homo sapiens. Then, according to Mithen, a "cognitive fluidity" tore through the walls of the "intelligence chapels" to acquire the broad range of abilities the mind exhibits today. While direct evidence of all this activity is, necessarily missing, the forceful presentation and elegant logic make it all a captivating read.

It's easy to critique Mithen's thesis. All you need is a competitive model of cognition. However, that would be unfair to what he has achieved, a carefully synthesized model of how human intelligence developed. Even without bringing in a competitive thesis, Mithen falls down in two important areas. After lengthy discussion of tool-making enhancing "technical" intelligence and its role in developing hunter-gatherer societies, he blithely omits any input from the "gathering" half of those communities. While rarely mentioning that tool-makers/hunters are almost exclusively male, even among chimpanzees, he restricts mention of female roles to the need to give birth to small-headed babies. He also depicts the changing of "social" intelligence associated with grooming in early hominids to the development of speech later. He ignores the possibility that speech is just as likely to have arisen within the community of females, who had greater reason to utilize it.

The second major flaw is his conclusion on how modern minds evolved from earlier ones. He argues that the "social" intelligence became the tool that opened the walls of his "intelligence chapels" of the cathedral. Since there is no reason to believe that intelligence should be so pigeon-holed as Mithen makes it, "social intelligence" as an integrating force is vague at best. Although i promised not to employ a competitive thesis, it's difficult not to refer the reader to Daniel C. Dennett's Multiple Drafts model of consciousness. If Mithen had consulted Dennett's Consciousness Explained, instead of blithely dismissing it, he would have discovered that his cathedral and chapels would have been built up over time instead of needing serious renovation at the end. Mithen would have been able to use the same evidence, indeed, the same metaphors, but with progressive construction instead of building then redecorating. Knocking down mental walls is not a satisfactory technique to build intellect. Instead, Mithen should have kept the theatre metaphor, which he restricts to history, and built up his drama from a soliloquy to a full cast epic. That would have allowed him to enlarge mental capacities through new players, scenery changes, improved interaction among the cast, perhaps with himself taking the final bow. Given the work he's obviously put into this and the wealth of evidence he's considered and offered us, a smattering of applause [after a careful reading of the libretto] is not out of order.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful read, now available in paperback, January 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (Paperback)

This is a book about the evolution of intelligence. It raises an interesting question right away: Why, after humans suddenly sprouted big brains about 2 million years ago, did they do nothing in particular WITH these wonderfully big new brains until just 100,000 years ago? And then suddenly at some moment, 100,000 years ago, yesterday morning in effect, exploded into action. In other words there was vast lag between the appearance of a mature brain anatomy and any sort of vigorous, laudable mental activity. The observation makes it necessary for science to account for 1.9 million years of mental leisure, of cavemen and women just hanging out. It also calls into question the easy and commonplace assumption that we evolved a big brain in response to some extraordinary evolutionary challenge - a challenge that required us to think faster and more clearly than our near cousins, the chimps.

Books about brains are a genre, and they are as formulaic as detective novels. They always begin by setting up, in the sense of setting up bowling pins, the currently fashionable system of ideas about how the brain might work. Then comes the bowling ball - the blockbuster idea that is supposed to knock aside and supplant all of these fashionable but sadly flawed ideas. The opening critique of the fashionable ideas is usually the best chapter of a brain book, the sweet spot, perhaps because it is the most intellectually honest (ideas about the workings of the brain never add up to much) and because the hostile critique, just by the way, brings you up to date on what people have been thinking on this subject lately.

This is well written and intelligent book. There is too much coy academic nudging and winking and nodding, but when you get past it, it tells its story well. The writing is especially clear and compelling on the subject of mental development in children.

For a very different point of view read The Monkey Puzzle (Gribbin), which suggested that the big brain evolved long, long ago, probably long before we were primates - and secretly rode the genome down through the eons until it was simply re-expressed in humans, as a full blown brain, for whatever accidental biochemical reason, 2 million years ago. Per this line of reasoning Chimps have the same blueprint for a big brain written into their DNA. They just don't express it. In other words the code for a big brain does not print out as an anatomical structure in chimps, but it is in their genes. As are other ancient but silent structures, like gills and flippers.

If there is anything to this idea, then the brain has had a pre-pre-history, during which it evolved as a thinking machine, possibly underwater. And the hunter-gatherer human phase of its evolution is a trivial overlay, a scrim on the surface of this much longer evolutionary period, lost in the remote past. Texts on neurophysiology often include a famous and (once you have seen them, indelible) pair of photos of excised human and dolphin brains side by side. The structures are essentially identical. The dolphin brain is supposed to have emerged 22 million years ago, our very near replica of it, 20 million years later. This is not to say we are descended of a dolphin. Maybe we are both descended of who knows whom. Some v. sharp witted reptile.

There is a rival brain book in the current season called "How the Mind Works." The Prehistory of the Mind covers the same ground and does a better job of it. It is nice to see it out in paperback