Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

Home > Other > Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods > Page 29
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Page 29

by E Fuller Torrey


  17.   L. C. Aiello and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language,” Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 184–193; Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 114–115, 125.

  18.   T. J. Crow, “Introduction,” in Crow, The Speciation of Modern Homo sapiens, 7–8, quoting Bickerton; Terrence C. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997); P. T. Schoenemann, “Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the Human Brain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006).

  19.   Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 15, 362; Richard Passingham, What Is Special About the Human Brain? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9; Perner and Wimmer, “John Thinks.”

  20.   Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 131; Mark Leary, The Curse of Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 390.

  21.   Pullum is quoted in P. Raffaele, “Speaking Bonobo,” Smithsonian, November 2006, 74. Pinker is quoted in Michael R. Trimble, The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art and Belief (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 57. George Washington Carver is quoted in P. V. Tobias, “Recent Advances in the Evolution of the Hominids with Special Reference to Brain and Speech,” in Recent Advances in the Evolution of Primates, ed. Carlos Chagas (Vatican City: Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarum Scripta Varia 50, 1983), 85–140.

  22.   Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 281–292; Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 257.

  23.   Q. D. Atkinson, “Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa,” Science 332 (2011): 346–349.

  24.   Zimmer, Evolution, 291, quoting Dunbar.

  25.   Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, 185.

  26.   de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 165.

  27.   D. Bickerton, “From Protolanguage to Language,” in The Speciation of Modern Homo sapiens, ed. Tim J. Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 108.

  28.   L. van der Meer, S. Costafreda, A. Aleman et al., “Self-Reflection and the Brain: A Theoretical Review and Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies with Implications for Schizophrenia,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34 (2010): 935–946.

  29.   D. T. Stuss, “Disturbance of Self-Awareness After Frontal System Damage,” in Awareness of Deficit After Brain Injury: Clinical and Theoretical Issues, ed. George P. Prigatano and Daniel L. Schacter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 68; D. M. Amodio and C. D. Frith, “Meeting of Minds: The Medial Frontal Cortex and Social Cognition,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 7 (2006): 268–277.

  30.   G. Northoff and F. Bermpohl, “Cortical Midline Structures and the Self,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 102–107; K. Tsapkini, C. E. Frangakis, and A. E. Hillis, “The Function of the Left Anterior Temporal Pole: Evidence from Acute and Stroke Infarct Volume,” Brain 134 (2011): 3094–3105. The anterior temporal pole is also an area that is frequently damaged by repetitive trauma in contact sports such as football; see K. Willeumier, D. V. Taylor, and D. G. Amen, “Elevated Body Mass in National Football League Players Linked to Cognitive Impairment and Decreased Prefrontal Cortex and Temporal Pole Activity,” Translational Psychiatry 2 (2012): e68; I. R. Olson, A. Plotzker, and Y. Ezzyat, “The Enigmatic Temporal Pole: A Review of Findings on Social and Emotional Processing,” Brain 130 (2007): 1718–1731.

  5. MODERN HOMO SAPIENS

    1.   P. Villa, S. Soriano, T. Tsanova et al., “Border Cave and the Beginning of the Later Stone Age in South Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109 (2012): 13208–13213; R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 29; C. Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping Stones: A Journey Through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 75.

    2.   Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth (New York: Times, 2012), 150; Brian Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 167; See also M. Balter, “Clothes Make the (Hu) Man,” Science 325 (2009): 1329.

    3.   David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 221–222; S. A. de Beaune and R. White, “Ice Age Lamps,” Scientific American, March 1993, 108–113.

    4.   S. O’Connor, R. Ono, and C. Clarkson, “Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans,” Science 334 (2011): 1117–1121.

    5.   Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic, 2009), 30; Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 169.

    6.   Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, rev. ed. (1972; Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1991), 79; John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain (New York: Routledge, 1989), 135–136; Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 234–235.

    7.   Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, 78; R. White, “Toward a Contextual Understanding of the Earliest Body Ornaments,” in The Emergence of Modern Humans, ed. Erik Trinkaus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 211–231, at 213, 225–226; R. White, “Rediscovering French Ice-Age Art,” Nature 320 (1986): 683–684.

    8.   S. McBrearty and A. S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453–563. See also R. White, “Beyond Art: Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 537–564; R. White, “Technological and Social Dimensions of ‘Aurignacian-Age’ Body Ornaments Across Europe,” in Before Lascaux: The Complex Record of the Early Upper Paleolithic, ed. Heidi Knecht, Anne Pike-Tay, and Randall White (Ann Arbor: CRC, 1992), 277–299; S. L. Kuhn, M. C. Stiner, D. S. Reese et al., “Ornaments of the Earliest Upper Paleolithic: New Insights from the Levant,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98 (2001): 7641–7646.

    9.   D. L. Smail and A. Shryock, “History and the ‘Pre,’ ” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 709–737.

  10.   Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 162; Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 73–76.

  11.   Tattersall, Becoming Human, 10.

  12.   Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 187; B. Klima, “A Triple Burial from the Upper Paleolithic of Dolní Vĕstonice, Czechoslovakia,” Journal of Human Evolution 16 (1988): 831–835; Brian Fagan, People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 134; Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, 142; Cochran and Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion.

  13.   T. Einwogerer, H. Friesinger, M. Handel et al., “Upper Palaeolithic Infant Burials,” Nature 444 (2006): 285; Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping Stones, 87; N. Wade, “24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians,” New York Times, November 21, 2013.

  14.   F. B. Harrold, “A Comparative Analysis of Eurasian Palaeolithic Burials,” World Archaeology 12 (1980): 195–211.

  15.   Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness (New York: Wiley, 2002), 247–251. See also P. B. Beaumont, H. de Villiers, and J. C. Vogel, “Modern Man in Sub-Saharan Africa Prior to 49 000 Years B.P.: A Review and Evalua
tion with Particular Reference to Border Cave,” South African Journal of Science 74 (1978): 409–419; A. Sillen and A. Morris, “Diagenesis of Bone from Border Cave: Implications for the Age of the Border Cave Hominids,” Journal of Human Evolution 31 (1996): 499–506; J. Parkington, “A Critique of the Consensus View on the Age of Howieson’s Poort Assemblages in South Africa,” in The Emergence of Modern Humans: An Archaeological Perspective, ed. Paul Mellars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34–55; Harrold, “A Comparative Analysis”; in support of Harrold’s position, see also B. Hayden, “The Cultural Capacities of Neandertals: A Review and Re-Evaluation,” Journal of Human Evolution 24 (1993): 113–146; Tattersall, Becoming Human, 162; in support of Tattersall’s position, see also Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 158–161; Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, 135–136; and M. Balter, “Did Neandertals Truly Bury Their Dead?,” Science 337 (2012): 1443–1444.

  16.   Tattersall, Becoming Human, 161; Klein and Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture, 192–193.

  17.   Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves (New York: Abrams, 1998), 114.

  18.   Klein and Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture, 196, quoting Mellars; Fagan, Cro-Magnon, 234.

  19.   Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists (New York: Anchor, 2006), 96; Claire Golomb, Child Art in Context: A Cultural and Comparative Perspective (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002), 100.

  20.   M. Aubert, A. Brumm, M. Ramli et al., “Pleistocene Cave Art from Sulawesi, Indonesia (Letter),” Nature 514 (2014): 223–227; J. Marchant, “The Awakening,” Smithsonian, January–February 2016, 80–95; A. W. G. Pike, D. L. Hoffmann, M. Garciá-Diez et al., “U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain,” Science 336 (2012): 1409–1413; David S. Whitley, Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2009), 53; Evan Hadingham, Secrets of the Ice Age: The World of the Cave Artists (New York: Walker, 1979), 260–271.

  21.   C. Walker, “First Artists,” National Geographic, January 2015, 33–57; N. J. Conard, “A Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany (Letter),” Nature 459 (2009): 248–252; Dunbar, The Human Story, 6; E. Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,” Science 326 (2009): 784–787, quoting Mellars; J. N. Wilford, “Flute’s Revised Age Dates the Sound of Music Earlier,” New York Times, May 29, 2012; M. Balter, “Early Dates for Artistic Europeans,” Science 336 (2012): 1086–1087; Stringer, Lone Survivors, 122.

  22.   Fagan, People of the Earth, 129. See also Lyn Wadley, “The Pleistocene Later Stone Age South of the Limpopo River,” Journal of World Prehistory 7 (1993): 243–296; D. Bruce Dickson, The Dawn of Belief (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Paul G. Bahn, “New Advances in the Field of Ice Age Art,” in Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans, ed. M. H. Nitecki and D. V. Nitecki (New York: Plenum, 1994), 121–132.

  23.   Clottes and Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory, 115; J. Clottes, “Thematic Changes in Upper Paleolithic Art: A View from the Grotte Chauvet,” Antiquity 70 (1996): 276–288; J. Clottes, “The ‘Three Cs’: Fresh Avenues Toward European Paleolithic Art,” in The Archaeology of Rock-Art, ed. Christopher Chippindale and Paul S. C. Taçon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 114; Curtis, The Cave Painters, 17.

  24.   Golomb, Child Art in Context, 106; M. Pruvost, R. Bellone, N. Benecke et al., “Genotypes of Predomestic Horses Match Phenotypes Painted in Paleolithic Works of Cave Art,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108 (2011): 18626–18630; W. Hunt, “Cave Painters Had a Leg up on Modern Painters,” Discover, December 2013, 18.

  25.   Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); John Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 1, 146; K. Turner, “Art with a Dark Past,” Washington Post, July 30, 2000; J.-P. Rigaud, “Lascaux Cave: Art Treasures from the Ice Age,” National Geographic, October 1988, 499; Andrew Shryock and Daniel L. Smail, Deep History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 131.

  26.   Curtis, The Cave Painters, 96, 114.

  27.   Brian Hayden, Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2003), 136; Curtis, The Cave Painters, 183–184.

  28.   Whitley, Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit, 65; M. Balter, “New Light on the Oldest Art,” Science 283 (1999): 920–922; L.-H. Fage, “Hands Across Time: Exploring the Rock Art of Borneo,” National Geographic, August 2005, 32–43; Paul Bahn, Prehistoric Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112–115; M. Jenkins, “Last of the Cave People,” National Geographic, February 2012, 127–141.

  29.   Clottes and Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory, 46.

  30.   White, “Beyond Art,” 558.

  31.   S. McBrearty and A. S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453–563.

  32.   P. Schilder and D. Wechsler, “The Attitudes of Children Toward Death,” Journal of Genetic Psychology 45 (1934): 406–451; D. J. Povinelli, K. R. Landau, and H. K. Perilloux, “Self-Recognition in Young Children Using Delayed Versus Live Feedback: Evidence of a Developmental Asynchrony,” Child Development 67 (1996): 1540–1554. See also K. Nelson, “The Psychological and Social Origins of Autobiographical Memory,” Psychological Science 4 (1993): 7–14; D. J. Povinelli, “The Unduplicated Self,” in The Self in Infancy: Theory and Research, ed. P. Rochat (New York: Elsevier, 1995), 161–192; William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 335.

  33.   J. S. DeLoache and N. M. Burns, “Early Understanding of the Representational Function of Pictures,” Cognition 52 (1994): 83–110; J. DeLoache, “Mindful of Symbols,” Scientific American 293 (2005): 72–77.

  34.   Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 11; C. M. Atance and D. K. O’Neill, “The Emergence of Episodic Future Thinking in Humans,” Learning and Motivation 36 (2005): 126–144. Serious research on autobiographical memory dates to the work of Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tulving in the 1970s; see, for example, E. Tulving, “Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 1–25; Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, vol. 1, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/etext/7178.

  35.   Atance and O’Neill, “The Emergence of Episodic Future Thinking”; T. Suddendorf, “Episodic Memory Versus Episodic Foresight: Similarities and Differences,” WIREs Cognitive Science 1 (2010): 99–107; J. Busby and T. Suddendorf, “Recalling Yesterday and Predicting Tomorrow,” Cognitive Development 20 (2005): 362–372; T. Suddendorf, “Linking Yesterday and Tomorrow: Preschoolers’ Ability to Report Temporally Displaced Events,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 28 (2010): 491–498; Eccles, Evolution of the Brain, 229; T. Suddendorf, D. R. Addis, and M. C. Corballis, “Mental Time Travel and the Shaping of the Human Mind,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009): 1317–1324. Suddendorf noted that research on the importance of foresight and its relationship to memory was singled out as one of the most significant breakthroughs by Science magazine in 2007 (see Suddendorf, “Episodic Memory”).

  36.   T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York: Airmont, 1965), 181–182.

  37.   D. R. Addis, D. C. Sacchetti, B. A. Ally et al., “Episodic Stimulation of Future Events Is Impaired in Mild Alzheimer’s Disease,” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009): 2660–2671; Carl Zimmer, “The Brain,” Discover, April
2011, 24–26; S. B. Klein and J. Loftus, “Memory and Temporal Experience: The Effects of Episodic Memory Loss on the Amnesic Patient’s Ability to Remember the Past and Imagine the Future,” Social Cognition 20 (2002): 353–379. See also Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (New York: Basic, 2013), 91, for a useful discussion of this.

  38.   For a summary of the lively debate about this question, see W. A. Roberts, “Mental Time Travel: Animals Anticipate the Future,” Current Biology 17 (2007): R418–R420; N. S. Clayton, T. J. Bussey, and A. Dickenson, “Can Animals Recall the Past and Plan for the Future?,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 4 (2003): 685–691; T. Suddendorf and M. C. Corballis, “Behavioural Evidence for Mental Time Travel in Nonhuman Animals,” Behavioural Brain Research 215 (2010): 292–298; M. Balter, “Can Animals Envision the Future? Scientists Spar Over New Data,” Science 340 (2013): 909.

  39.   Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, 168; Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, 78.

  40.   Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, 79; M. W. Conkey, “The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 609–620.

  41.   Suddendorf, Addis, and Corballis, “Mental Time Travel”; Suddendorf, “Episodic Memory.”

  42.   Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (1871; New York: Holt, 1874). Tylor cited Darwin’s findings in vol. 2, pp. 152 and 223.

 

‹ Prev