Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

202 I HOW THE MIND WORKSinto a basket, a baby sling, a boomerang, or a bow and arrow. Contemporaryhunter-gatherers use many self-composting implements for everylasting one, and that must have been true of hominids at every stage. Thearcheological record is bound to underestimate tool use.So the standard timetable for human brain evolution begins the storytoo late; I think it also ends the story too early. Modern humans (us) aresaid to have first arisen between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago inAfrica. One kind of evidence is that the mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) ofeveryone on the planet (which is inherited only from one's mother) canbe traced back to an African woman living sometime in that period. (Theclaim is controversial, but the evidence is growing.) Another is thatanatomically modern fossils first appear in Africa more than 100,000years ago and in the Middle East shortly afterward, around 90,000 yearsago. The assumption is that human biological evolution had pretty muchstopped then. This leaves an anomaly in the timeline. The anatomicallymodern early humans had the same toolkit and lifestyle as their doomedNeanderthal neighbors. The most dramatic change in the archeologicalrecord, the Upper Paleolithic transition—also called the Great Leap Forwardand the Human Revolution—had to wait another 50,000 years.Therefore, it is said, the human revolution must have been a culturalchange.Calling it a revolution is no exaggeration. All other hominids come outof the comic strip B.C., but the Upper Paleolithic people were the Flintstones.More than 45,000 years ago they somehow crossed sixty miles ofopen ocean to reach Australia, where they left behind hearths, cavepaintings, the world's first polished tools, and today's aborigines. Europe(home of the Cro-Magnons) and the Middle East also saw unprecedentedarts and technologies, which used new materials like antler, ivory,and bone as well as stone, sometimes transported hundreds of miles. Thetoolkit included fine blades, needles, awls, many kinds of axes and scrapers,spear points, spear throwers, bows and arrows, fishhooks, engravers, flutes,maybe even calendars. They built shelters, and they slaughtered large animalsby the thousands. They decorated everything in sight—tools, cavewalls, their bodies—and carved knick-knacks in the shapes of animalsand naked women, which archeologists euphemistically call "fertilitysymbols." They were us.Ways of life certainly can shoot off without any biological change, asin the more recent agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions.That is especially true when populations grow to a point where the