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

Revenge of the Nerds 203insights of thousands of inventors can be pooled. But the first humanrevolution was not a cascade of changes set off by a few key inventions.Ingenuity itself was the invention, manifested in hundreds of innovationstens of thousands of miles and years apart. I find it hard to believethat the people of 100,000 years ago had the same minds as those of theUpper Paleolithic revolutionaries to come—indeed, the same minds asours—and sat around for 50,000 years without it dawning on a singleone of them that you could carve a tool out of bone, or without a singleone feeling the urge to make anything look pretty.And there is no need to believe it—the 50,000-year gap is an illusion.First, the so-called anatomically modern humans of 100,000 years agomay have been more modern than their Neanderthal contemporaries,but no one would mistake them for contemporary humans. They hadbrow ridges, protruding faces v and heavily built skeletons outside thecontemporary range. Their bodies had to evolve to become us, and theirbrains surely did as well. The myth that they are completely moderngrew out of the habit of treating species labels as if they were real entities.When applied to evolving organisms, they are no more than a convenience.No one wants to invent a new species every time a tooth isfound, so intermediate forms tend to get shoehorned into the nearestavailable category. The reality is that hominids must always have come indozens or hundreds of variants, scattered across a large network of occasionallyinteracting subpopulations. The tiny fraction of individuals immortalizedas fossils at any point were not necessarily our direct ancestors.The "anatomically modern" fossils are closer to us than to anyone else,but either they had more evolving to do or they were away from thehotbed of change.Second, the revolution probably began well before the commonlycited watershed of 40,000 years ago. That's when fancy artifacts begin toappear in European caves, but Europe has always attracted more attentionthan it deserves, because it has lots of caves and lots of archeologists.France alone has three hundred well-excavated paleolithic sites,including one whose cave paintings were scrubbed off by an overenthusiasticboy scout troop that mistook them for graffiti. The entire continentof Africa has only two dozen. But one, in Zaire, contains finely craftedbone implements including daggers, shafts, and barbed points, togetherwith grindstones brought from miles away and the remains of thousandsof catfish, presumably the victims of these instruments. The collectionlooks postrevolutionary but is dated at 75,000 years ago. One commenta-