Brain (2005), 128, 1737–1740
BOOK REVIEW
‘Talking up the use of language’
The attempt to define and perhaps understand what it is to be
human within a broadly scientific perspective is less than
150 years old. For the anthropologist as for the archaeologist,
the annus mirabilis was 1859, when the ‘Antiquity of Man’
was definitely recognized and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of
Species was published. The former, by recognizing the vast
antiquity of the chipped stone tools found in the gravel pits of
the Somme valley (long predating any estimate for the biblical
Charles Darwin
1809–1882
Creation as narrated in the Book of Genesis) cleared a space of
time in which the process of becoming human could take
place. The latter, in outlining the central process of development by which living things are related, carried implications
for the emergence of humankind which were later spelled out
explicitly in Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). Since that time
we have learned a great deal about the fossil ancestors which
preceded the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens and, recently,
DNA studies have allowed quite detailed inferences to be
made about the structure of the family tree through which
human diversity has been elaborated since the first human
dispersals out of Africa some time between 85 000 and 55 000
years ago. Yet, despite the best efforts of anthropologists or of
neuroscientists, or indeed of philosophers, we have still come
to learn remarkably little about the development of the
human mind, and perhaps not a great deal more about
that of the brain. It is now nearly 30 years since Sir John
Eccles, neuroscientist, sat down with Sir Karl Popper,
philosopher of science, to debate The Self and Its Brain,
and despite some theoretical clarifications, and the development of magnetic resonance imaging, allowing the study of
which parts of the brain are active during the performance of
#
THE FIRST IDEA: HOW
SYMBOLS, LANGUAGE
AND
INTELLIGENCE
EVOLVED FROM OUR
PRIMATE ANCESTORS
TO MODERN HUMANS
Stanley I. Greenspan and
Stuart G. Shanker
2004. Cambridge, Mass.:
Da Capo Press
Price UK £14.99,
US $25.00
ISBN 0-7382-0680-6
various tasks, we still lack most of the answers. Yet there are
indications that some elements at least of the solution are now
being identified.
For me, as an archaeologist, one of the most unexpected
insights comes from recent developments in archaeogenetics,
the application of molecular genetics to the understanding of
human prehistory and history. For, although the analysis of
ancient DNA, extracted from bones deriving from early
archaeological contexts, has proved informative in only a
few cases, it is DNA from living people which has produced
the most comprehensive picture. The first outline came with
the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, passed on exclusively
in the female line, where the comparison of samples taken
from individuals from all over the world allowed the data, in
terms of similarities and differences in the DNA sequences, to
be ordered into a classificatory tree or dendrogram. Following
certain assumptions this can be regarded as a family tree,
giving valid insight into genetic relationships, and some
idea can be gained for the date of bifurcation of the various
branches. So, from these recent samples, we have a sort of
‘family tree’ for the whole of humankind reaching back
more than 100 000 years into the past. Comparable studies
have been carried out for the male lineages, using the nonrecombining part of the Y-chromosome, to give broadly compatible results. One of these is that, to the best of our current
belief, a sapiens child born 50 000 years ago would vary very
little in genetic terms from one born today, and vice versa.
The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
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Brain (2005), 128, 1737–1740
Book review
Sir Karl Popper
1902–1994
Sir John Eccles
1903–1997
So what has changed? How do we differ today from our
ancestors of 50 000 years ago? Clearly the essential transformations which have taken place are not to the genetically
inherited structure of the organism. They are to the world into
which a child is born, the cultural and social world. If each of
us today is different from our ancestors of 50 000 years ago in
terms of our skills and attainments, it must be because each
of us individually has learned, in the space of a childhood of
10–15 years, what it has taken us collectively several tens of
thousands of years to develop.
This theme of the profound significance of early learning
processes in the child is central to The First Idea. Stanley
Greenspan, a clinical professor of psychiatry, has specialized
in clinical work with infants and young children. His colleague Stuart Shanker is a philosopher who has specialized
in ape-language research and child-language studies. Together
they are able to do justice to the theme of the cognitive growth
of the young individual, and they have put these insights to
work in the production of an ambitious book which sets the
successive phases of child cognitive development within a
broadly evolutionary context. They develop a series of sixteen
stages of functional emotional developmental level, set out in
their tabular ‘Overview of transformation in emotional and
intellectual growth’ of the individual, an elaboration that goes
well beyond the sequence established by Jean Piaget.
One of the great strengths of their book is their reluctance
to accept any genetic determinism which assumes that the
effects of the cultural and social environment are passed on to
descendents through the mechanism of change in the genetic
structure. For, if the above conclusions from archaeogenetics
are taken into account, the trajectories of development of
human societies in different parts of the world over the
past 40 000 years have not been accompanied by any very
significant changes in the genetic structure. Certainly there
is a persistent capacity to learn, which is enabled and facilitated by that genetic structure. But the essential changes
came about through learning. And the changes in brain structure which may result are not genetically determined but a
feature of growth processes occurring during the learning
experience and responding, it is argued, to the intensive
use of specific pathways in the brain during the developmental
process. One important strand of the authors’ argument here
is the role of the emotions, which they associate in an interesting way with the capacity to think symbolically in cognitive
development. They see this capacity, then, not as something
determined genetically but as induced by the cognitive
(including emotional) experiences of childhood.
Sometimes, when one reads popular accounts of the
‘human revolution’ setting out the various stages of hominid
evolution that led to the emergence of our species Homo
sapiens sapiens, one almost has the impression that with
this emergence achieved—and with the linguistic skills and
self-awareness associated with our species, as well as the
capacity for symbolic representation seen, for instance, in
the painted caves of Upper Palaeolithic France and Spain
(such as Lascaux and Altamira), now available—the revolutionary task is virtually accomplished. It is puzzling that our
species was well established over much of the world by
30 000 years ago, yet it took another 20 000 years for such
notable changes as the development of sedentism, the inception of agriculture and subsequently the development of state
societies and of urbanism. Why did all this take so long? For
me, this is the ‘sapient paradox’, and its explanation lies not in
the hardware, the genetically determined structure, but in the
software, the developing cultural environment of the changing societies into which each generation of new humans is
born. Insights into the learning process, of which the authors
have great experience, are therefore very valuable. Their view
of the development of symbolic cognition within society as
something which happens gradually, through social interaction, and is then passed on between the generations,
through learning processes in which emotions play an important role in the formulation of symbols, is a refreshing one.
In dismissing what they term the Big Bang theory,
associated with Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, that the
capacity of humans to speak arose through genetic mutations
emerging in the Pleistocene period, they may be adopting a
position different from that of most anthropologists today,
who find it tempting to attribute the adaptive success of our
species to the capacity for complex speech. But they are right
Book review
in that our estimate for the time when humans learned to
speak remains largely hypothetical. Arguments have indeed
been advanced for developed speech capabilities in our
earlier ancestor Homo erectus, of half a million years ago.
And certainly there are arguments for thinking that the
shipbuilding and seafaring capacities which they apparently
possessed may have depended upon a considerable degree of
linguistic skill.
In most cases it is very difficult to use the archaeological
data to yield reliable conclusions about speech capacity. For
instance, the carefully worked and sometimes beautifully
symmetrical core tools, the so-called hand axes of the
Lower Palaeolithic, dating from half a million and more
years ago and produced by our ancestor Homo erectus,
have sometimes been taken as an indicator of speech ability.
How else would they pass on from generation to generation,
over this long tool-making tradition, the skills and the conventions underlying this well-defined style? But to say this may
be to underestimate the effectiveness of mimetic learning,
as Merlin Donald has emphasized, where developed speech
may not be required at all. Innovations and technical improvements can be transmitted from one generation to the
next by simple processes of imitative learning. Some speech
capacity might be involved, but it might simply involve
sounds to draw attention to what is interesting and to
encourage mimesis, rather than any sophisticated vocabulary.
The case seems rather different with the discovery of
chipped stone tools on the island of Flores in the Lesser
Sundas (in the Circum New Guinea archipelago) dating to
circa 800 000 years ago (Morwood et al., 1998, 1999). For
it seems that, even with the eustatic fall in sea levels during
glacial episodes, the island would at all times have been
separated by at least some 20 km of sea, involving the use
of boats or at least rafts. For a group of people to construct
such a vessel, even a simple one, and then travel together in it
across the sea suggests a distinctly cooperative endeavour. To
generate long-term occupation, as the artefacts found suggest,
would imply a number of travellers, in effect a minimum
breeding population. It is difficult to see how such an enterprise could be undertaken without some expression of intentionality and the indication of intended results in the future,
both to those participating in the construction of the boat or
raft and to those proposing to undertake the voyage. Such
expressions and indications must surely have taken verbal
form, in a mode capable of distinguishing future from
present, and have permitted some discussion of hypothetical
benefits resulting from such a hazardous project. This seems
to come close to a working definition of complex speech
capacity. If this argument holds, the implication must be
that already our ancestors of 800 000 years ago possessed
such a capacity. Such a view would run counter to much
current wisdom. For this could no longer be the innovation
widely felt so clearly to distinguish our own species Homo
sapiens sapiens from our presapient predecessors, as so many
commentators currently suppose.
Brain (2005), 128, 1737–1740
1739
The interactionist view advocated by the authors—that
mind develops through the practice of social relations—is
very well set out and developed here. They have no time
for the cognitivism of the 1960s, born of an enthusiasm for
artificial intelligence, or for the view that the workings of the
mind may effectively be modelled by analogy with those of the
digital computer. They are right to stress that mind involves
the social relations with other humans, which language indeed
facilitates, and that the development of mind is therefore a
social phenomenon. But in one sense this view may not go far
enough. For the archaeologist (who is very much aware of the
material remains of human activity, since these are his or her
stock in trade), it perhaps comes naturally to discern the
significance of the more material aspects of existence. Indeed,
the story of the changes taking place in human societies over
the past 40 000 years may be seen as very much one of an
increasing engagement between humans and the material
world, an engagement which has a cognitive as well as a
physical dimension. To take just one example, the development of a system of measurement based on weight, without
which the exchange of commodities would be cumbersome, is
obviously predicated upon the formulation of the concept of
weight. Yet this could come about only through the experience of some things being heavy and others being light—the
conceptual aspects of measure have to be rooted in a real,
physical engagement with the properties of the world. The
way humans use the world, and have developed these material
properties through the inception of agriculture, pyrotechnology, transportation, exchange and so on are very much a part
of being human. But the interactionist view developed by
Greenspan and Shanker, although it offers part of the
story, does not develop this theme of material engagement
and of human interactions with things. It does not include any
notion of the active role of material culture within its interactionist framework.
The initiative of setting a broadly psychological approach
within an evolutionary framework, informed by the findings
of prehistoric archaeology, is a welcome one. In this respect
the authors were anticipated by Merlin Donald, whose Origins
of the Modern Mind (1991) usefully developed the notion of
‘external symbolic storage’, the process whereby information
is stored outside the body, so to speak, by devices such as
writing. He showed lucidly how such devices open the way to
theoretical thought, and thus in some senses to the further
development of mind. But it was possible to offer the criticism
(Renfrew, 1998) that Donald did not sufficiently emphasize
the material role of symbolic artefacts in the structuring of
social transactions before the development of writing. Donald
did, however, develop a series of phases for the development
of human cognition which meshed well with the archaeological evidence. Unfortunately, Greenspan and Shanker
handle the archaeology less satisfactorily. Their ‘timeline
for human evolutionary development’ does not recognize
sufficiently that different trajectories of cultural development
on different continents developed at different rates. And it is
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Brain (2005), 128, 1737–1740
distinctly cursory in its treatment of the quite abundant
archaeological data.
Underlying their entire discussion, although never quite
stated in so many words, is the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: that the developmental evolution of the
individual, newly born into society, in some respects traces
again the path that the society as a whole has already taken in
its collective development. But in some respects the train of
the argument is in practice reversed in their treatment, since it
is the emotional and intellectual growth of the child about
which the authors are clear and articulate, and the ‘timeline
for human evolutionary development’ about which they are
very much hazier. Yet the argument is still a very interesting
one, since the ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ formulation
is generally applied in cases where the story is one of a genetically evolving structure (for the phylogeny) which is then
recapitulated in the growth life story of the individual. Here,
however, the authors are clear that, within the time span
of our species (whether 80 000 or 130 000 years), these are
not changes governed by a changing genetic structure but
through the nature of the learning process.
Clearly we are still a very long way from an integrated view
of human cultural development. Sir John Eccles opined that
such problems will be resolved when we have a more complete
scientific understanding of the brain, ‘perhaps in hundreds
of years’. The authors are more concerned about mind, in
the sense of the behaviour of the individual person within
society, than with the functioning of the brain, in respect
of its internal structure or its neurophysiology. But they
have here bravely undertaken one part of what is clearly an
immense task.
Already Merlin Donald performed a real service in considering different kinds of thought process, and in analysing the
means of symbolic storage and the various props whose
development facilitates theoretical thought (such as maps,
and writing, especially the alphabet). Archaeology has still
much to contribute to such a future integrated framework,
and the development of material engagement theory
(Malafouris, 2004; Renfrew, 2004) may prove to have something to offer. It is already clear, however, that in one sense
ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, and the newborn individual undertakes the extraordinary task of learning in a
decade or two much that the accumulated experience of
humankind has taken 40 millennia to formulate. Original
thinking of the kind undertaken by Greenspan and Shanker
Book review
about the nature of this learning process will form an essential
component of the synthesis which will one day be achieved.
It seems likely that for many years to come there will be two
distant and distinct ends of a spectrum in this field, just as
there were nearly 30 years ago with Eccles at one end (with the
neurophysiology of the brain) and Popper at the other
(as the guardian of mind). Just as there has been great progress
at the physiological end with images of functional brain
activity, so the conceptual end is advancing. Cognitive archaeology is beginning to make its contributions, offering hard
data from the archaeological record capable of documenting
the early practice of intelligently structured activities involving planning. Developmental psychology, as this interesting
book shows, has much to offer. But we still seem a long way
from any well-integrated view that can bring these disparate
fields together.
Colin Renfrew
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge
and Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge,
UK
doi:10.1093/brain/awh564
References
Darwin C. The origin of species. London: John Murray; 1859.
Darwin C. The descent of man. London: John Murray; 1871.
Donald M. Origins of the modern mind. Harvard: Harvard University Press;
1991.
Malafouris L. The cognitive basis of material engagement, where brain and
body conflate. In: DeMarrais E, Gosden C, Renfrew C, editors. Rethinking
materiality. Cambridge: McDonald Institute; 2004. p. 53–62.
Morwood MJ, O’Sullivan PB, Aziz F, Raza A. Fission track age of stone
tools and fossils on the East Indonesian island of Flores. Nature 1998;
392: 173–6.
Morwood MJ, Aziz F, O’Sullivan P, Nasruddin, Hobbs DR, Raza A. Archaeological and palaeontological research in central Flores, East Indonesia:
results of fieldwork 1997–98. Antiquity 1999; 73: 273–86.
Popper KC, Eccles JC. The self and its brain: an argument for interactionism.
London: Springer International; 1977.
Renfrew C. Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and symbolic storage.
In: Renfrew C, Scarre C, editors. Cognition and material culture, the
archaeology of symbolic storage. Cambridge: McDonald Institute; 1998.
p. 1–6.
Renfrew C. Towards a theory of material engagement. In: DeMarrais E,
Gosden C, Renfrew C, editors. Rethinking materiality. Cambridge:
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