Comments on Steven Mithen's Book (1996) The Prehistory of The Mind

By Razie Mah

Over twenty years ago, Steven Mithen, a British archaeologist, published one of the most eloquently written books on human evolution. The Prehistory of The Mind (1996) frames the past six million years with two evocative analogies. The first is a play in four acts. The second is the evolution of church architecture in the West.
These powerful metaphors do not explain human evolution. They re-describe it, bringing to the fore the character of the evidence as well as the cognition that goes with the evidence. The first two acts describe the evolution of primate general intelligence leading to a turn toward specialized cognition. The third act describes the evolution of the "Romanesque" mind of Homo erectus. Here, specialized intelligences come to the fore.
The fourth act describes a breakdown of the walls of the separate "chapels" of specialized intelligence, forming the "Gothic" mind of anatomically modern humans. General intelligence was transformed, perhaps through language, into an open space for meta-representation. Mithen calls the result: cognitive fluidity.
The Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition exemplifies cognitive fluidity. Tools fit the job. Religion is everywhere. The art is beautiful.
These comments add one ingredient to Mithen's argument. They present the human niche. The cognitive adaptations of the hominins exploit the human niche. Thus, Mithen's re-depiction of human evolution finds footing in biology. His metaphors are rich. Now, they carry more than they did before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Feb 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781942824411

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on Steven Mithen’s Book (1996) The Prehistory of the Mind

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2018

Notes on Text

This essay comments on a 1996 book by archaeologist, Steven Mithen. The title is The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. The publisher is Thames and Hudson in New York.

My goal is to supplement Mithen’s arguments by formulating the human niche. The human niche is the potential of traidic relations. The cognitive adaptations that Mithen describes exploit this niche.

The human niche backs up Mithen’s metaphor-rich argument with a biological hypothesis, resulting in a deeper appreciation of human evolution.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form (#1), Primer on Sensible and Social Construction (#2), Comments on Michael Cole and Martin Packer’s Essay (2016) A Bio-Cultural Historical Approach to Culture and Psychology.

Table of Contents

The Winds of Psychology

Chapters 2, 3 and 4

Comparing Analogies

Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8

Interlude between Chapters 8 and 9

Chapters 9 and 10

Epilogue

The Winds of Psychology

0001 Archaeologist Steven Mithen published The Prehistory of the Mind in the 1990s, just as the budding field of evolutionary psychology upset cognitive psychology. Here is a whirlwind history, all in the present tense.

0002 In the middle of the 20th century, psychologists work with a standard model of cognition. General cognition is the focus of attention. Some researchers go one step further and reduce cognition to a black box. A black box stands between a stimulus and a response. If the stimulus and response can be mathematically modeled, there is no need to understand what happens in the box.

0003 Cognitive psychologists counter by proposing that some form of cognition goes into the black box. They figure out ways to demonstrate that unconscious processes depend on cognition.

For example, when a discrepant event occurs in a story, people are more likely to remember that