Rating: 
Summary: speculative, but very inspiring
Review: A speculative, but very inspiring book. It was the first book that made me realize, about five years ago, that - by asking the right kind of questions while studying the artifacts of our early ancestors - quite far going conclusions can be drawn about their mental capacities and limitations. It was also the first book that introduced to me the novel idea of the modular structure of human mind, which is now very central to evolutionary psychology. It was also my first acquaintance with some of the ideas of - inter alia - Daniel Dennett, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. That is why this book is very dear to me.
In writing this book, Mithen was not afraid to stick out his neck. Also, five years is quite a long time in the development of modern science. So it should not amaze anyone that today some of his ideas look less convincing. This concerns especially the idea that language originally was only used for social relations and only in a later phase was also put to the service of practical activities. This idea has been demolished by Derek Bickerton in "Lingua ex Machina - Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain ". Bickerton demonstrates that it is quite unlikely that language in its first stages should not have been used for warning band members about imminent danger or informing them about rich findings of food. He agrees that social relations are likely to have played a very important role in the process of transformation of this very simple multi-purpose "proto-language" into the grammatically and syntactically far more elaborate languages of modern man.
It would be interesting to see how Mithen would integrate such new ideas in an updated edition of his seminal work.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Speculation
Review: At first blush, the idea of creating an archeology of the human mind seems improbable, but Mithen actually makes compelling reading. Mithen isolates specific mental skills that most probably were used by our ancestors and traces there modifications and eventual integration to form the modern human brain.The reader does not have to buy into the specific developmental theory of the book in order to be challenged and amazed by the insights. Mithen is clearly not in possession of the final answer to questions about our intellectual heritage, but he clearly shows that it is fruitful to consider questions of the etiology of religon, art and science from an archaeological perspective. Mithen shows that there is much more that can be learned from the study of the development of human culture. Moreover, the book is well illustrated and written in a manner that opens up these concepts to the lay reader. Thought provoking and rewarding, this book makes the long history of mankind and our ancestors seem tangible. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Swiss Army Knife, Cathedral Or Tree Of Knowledge?
Review: Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive archaeologists have argued that homo sapiens developed large brains to be able to do the immense calculations of social interaction in one's own tribe. Human tribes are large and thus require lots of Machiavellian calculating in order to come out on top and compete for status and resources. This same argument states that our brains have Swiss army knife architectures. Meaning that various domains of intelligence developed separately in homo sapiens; one for tool making, one for dealing with the natural world, one for language, one for society, etc, but in the past they never interacted much and thus there was little awareness of self-which is a social biological explanation of Freud's unconscious mind theory. As human tribes got larger and more complex the social domain took off and by constant interaction and competition, it in turn got "contaminated" by other domains...the Darwinian fittest watching and observing the movements and behaviors of others and hence their unconscious domains, so that cross domain fluidity occurred. This is why Mithen thinks the cultural explosion occurred, a contaminated Machiavellian social domain gathering and compiling non-social domain intelligence to help compete in the social arena. This is a powerful argument because it means that our innate cutthroat tendencies encourage us to gather extra-cutthroat intelligence. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it from cover to cover. The only caveat I have with it is that occasionally Mithen's arguments are not soundly based in logic. Often, he'll make a statement saying if A then B, but he'll never say why B. Often he'll make statements that if we observe this behavior then we know that this is true, because "...that is what we expect..." and he'll never back up or explain how if that is so then why is it expected? There are many leaps of faith here, the ultimate is at the end of the book where he claims that the entire work now thwarts any argument that the mind had a supernatural origin, even though he only invested perhaps a sentence or two on this bold statement and presented no arguments to support it. I am always amazed when scientists do that. They often do not support their materialist, atheistic conclusions with any scientific evidence, argument or experiment. All they do is describe a possible scenario for how reality works, which we expect science itself will eventually expand on or delete as antiquated anyway. Who's to say a supernatural force didn't design the very system Mithen describes, or natural selection, punctuated equilibrium, etc; simply because these scientists' concepts of spirituality, religion and deity are not themselves very developed. Just because evolution is self-perpetuating, does it mean that this isn't an ideal system that a supernatural mind would come up with? A metaphor is in order: an embryo grows in spite of the fact that the father withdrew his penis from the womb a long time before. Does that make the father unreal? This idea somehow escapes the scientific mind. Scientists need to use scientific method to examine why a supernatural force did not design his own hypothetical system, or leave it alone in agnostic obscurity. Often scientists attack other people's "concepts" of deity and not deity itself and then claim that they have taken down the whole, when nothing of the sort occurred. And, of course, this is unscientific. I am thinking straw man here. There are too many ifs when that assortment of problems is questioned. For example, if our brains evolved in an atmosphere of Machiavellian intrigue, and the natural tendency would be to go with gravity, would a deity knowing that forbidding man from consuming the metaphorical fruit is nothing more than cross-domain fluidity? Would telling them not to do it insure that they would, and in doing so set the stage for the creation of a nation through and by the function of evil? It takes an understanding of Genesis and Mithen to ask such a question. One can still believe that religion could be an unintended accident or it could be hard-wired, inevitability or a cause, and we are right where we left off. Mithen hypothesized what was there, how evolving minds reacted but not what instigated them. And when reading Mithen, holding these limitations in mind, he nevertheless, has a lot of interesting things to say.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to comprehend, very interesting, 70 diagrams-4.5 stars!
Review: From whence did art, religion, and science manifest? A new evolutionary proposal is constructed for the cognitive origins of such practices in Modern Humans, from the Early Humans (since the 6 million old common ancestor shared with chimpanzees) who knew no such trades. Using the works of others he sets forth metaphors for the human mind. Some may call it a sponge or computer, but neither are very accurate. Then it was called a Swiss-Army knife, with each blade or tool representing a specialized domain of human intelligence. Steven Mithen later shows that this is representative of only earlier minds, up to Neanderthals, in which each domain of specialization was isolated from all others. Natural selection's pyschological trajectory plasmatured three phases of the mind. As an archaeologist, Mithen now models the brain surprisingly as a medieval cathedral, from his profession's experience. Phase 1 is a mind with a nave of general intelligence. Phase 2 is a mind with a nave of general intellience and multiple 'chapels' of specialized intelligences. Phase 3 is a Phase 2 mind with a certain holistic fluidity of interaction between the general intelligence and each specialized intelligence, as well as between all specialized intelligences. The path of this evolutionary branch is illustrated by his archaeological knowledge. Toolmaking is studied--from the ant retrieving twigs of chimps to the word processing programs of homo sapiens sapiens that I typed this book review on. The process undertaken by natural selection to mold our brains is akin to that of a computer programmer who molds software programs. At one point there was a cultural explosion and acceleration of human activity. Rather than regarding this as divine intervention, the author has pinpointed the source neurologically in early man. Art, religion, and science are epiphenomenons of cognitive fluidity. By coalescing all specialized domains of human intelligence (into a Phase 3 mind), the overlaps created new domains of advancement. These are only a few of the things however included as a by-product of fluid cognition. (The epilogue spends more paper explaining agriculture than did the main work on religion, art, or science! [also, not all overlap was good, racism is also traced to a converge of two pyschological domains]) Summed up--The Prehistory of the Mind is a delightful read recommended on human phylogeny.
Rating:
Summary: Clearly constructed and supported arguments.
Review: I loved reading this book. Mithen's arguments are clearly constructed and well supported. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, Mithen does an excellent job describing the process of evolution with respect to human cognition. I think this makes it a particularly good introductory book. I also enjoyed its discussion of the architecture of the mind. Mithen describes competing and complementary theories from disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, neurology, primatology, biological anthropology, social anthropology, and computer science. In the process, he begins to synthesize his own theory, which he then supports with archeological evidence. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution of mind. It's a good introduction for those just learning about the topic, as was the case for myself when I first read this book. I also think it could provide rich food for thought for the more learned cognitive scientists.
Rating:
Summary: The archaeology book of the 1990s
Review: I read The Prehistory of the Mind when it first came out, and my copy has now been read several times. As a prehistoric archaeologist, I have found this the most exciting and richly stimulating book on archaeology that I have read during the 1990s. Steve Mithen brings together new ideas from evolutionary and developmental psychology, and produces a (controversial) theory of the evolution of the human mind. The great value of his book is that Mithen sets a theoretical sequence generalised from the work of the evolutionary psychologists into the context of the archaeological evidence, from the earliest hominids through to the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens. He seeks to relate the mental capabilities of our hominid ancestors to the ways in which they made and used stone tools. His unfolding of the evolved abilities of the modern human mind against the archaeology, art, ritual human burials etc of the European upper palaeolithic period of 40,000 to 30,000 years ago provides a convincing and at last scientific theory to underpin the idea of the 'upper palaeolithic revolution' that a number of archaeologists and anthropologists have been talking about for some years. I think that this book will prove to have a decisive influence on the development of archaeological theory, and that it will inspire archaeologists to do a lot of thinking in quite new directions, seeking to derive much more information about the mental, psychological, cultural and social behaviour of prehistoric peoples from traditional archaeological data.
Rating:
Summary: A brave effort, generally persuasive but a bit vague
Review: In this book, Mithen takes on the formidable task of describing how the mind of modern humans emerged from the minds of earlier hominids. The scarcity of hard evidence from prehistoric times, particularly about physical changes in the brain, makes this difficult to do. Mithen adopts the concept that there are different kinds of intelligence such as general, social, and technical. In his view, human ancestors evolved from having only general intelligence to supplementing that with other, specialized intelligences that enabled tool-making and language. The explosion in cultural creativity between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago occurred when these various intelligences were integrated, making possible art, religion, and science. Consciousness adopted the role of an integrating mechanism for knowledge that had been trapped in separate specialized intelligences. Mithen writes that the use of metaphor and analogy is the most significant feature of the human mind. He has to rely on metaphor and analogy to convey some of the ideas in this book. While his speculations are generally persuasive, they often rest on a frustratingly vague substrate. Mithen's epilogue on the origin of agriculture, being better founded on evidence, is more specific. The book is illustrated with numerous diagrams, some of them too schematic to be scientifically useful.
Rating:
Summary: A brave effort, generally persuasive but a bit vague
Review: In this book, Mithen takes on the formidable task of describing how the mind of modern humans emerged from the minds of earlier hominids. The scarcity of hard evidence from prehistoric times, particularly about physical changes in the brain, makes this difficult to do. Mithen adopts the concept that there are different kinds of intelligence such as general, social, and technical. In his view, human ancestors evolved from having only general intelligence to supplementing that with other, specialized intelligences that enabled tool-making and language. The explosion in cultural creativity between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago occurred when these various intelligences were integrated, making possible art, religion, and science. Consciousness adopted the role of an integrating mechanism for knowledge that had been trapped in separate specialized intelligences. Mithen writes that the use of metaphor and analogy is the most significant feature of the human mind. He has to rely on metaphor and analogy to convey some of the ideas in this book. While his speculations are generally persuasive, they often rest on a frustratingly vague substrate. Mithen's epilogue on the origin of agriculture, being better founded on evidence, is more specific. The book is illustrated with numerous diagrams, some of them too schematic to be scientifically useful.
Rating: 
Summary: "Early humans were idiotic"
Review: Mithen attempts to create a very simplistic overview of the human mind by cutting it into five simple modules. He then attempts to explain prehistoric minds by simply removing the connections between them. This method leads Mithen to view our ancestors as a caricature of stupidity, as in this example where he discusses why Neanderthals didn't make anything from bone: "The first [enigma] was the absence of artifacts made from bone, antler or ivory. This can only be explained by recognising that Early Humans [Neanderthals] could not think of using such materials for tools: these materials were once part of animals and animals were thought about in the domain of natural history intelligence. The conceptual leap required to think about parts of animals, using cognitive processes which had evolved in the domain of inert, physical objects, appears to have been too great for Early Humans." (p147) I'm no neurologist or archaeologist, but I can see that there are some serious problems with his arguments here. I'll outline a few. 1. Mithen is suggesting that Early Humans' intelligence was working against them: They had the intelligence to see that a bone came from an animal (not something that too many animals seem to be able to do), yet they couldn't see a bone by its physical properties (a much simpler task, and a task that would be required to track a bone's movements from animal to carcass to bone). This would mean the brain would have the impossible task of deliberately "forgeting" or "blocking off" all of the bone's physical attributes that might be useful for tool making (shape, hardness, etc) while still recognising it and remembering only where it came from. On top of this the brain must only allow this sort of pointless stupidity for objects coming from animals. Objects would suddenly become hazy as they were recognised as belonging to Natural History Intelligence. "Gee, Grook, why don't we make things out of these?" "Zook, you fool! That's an animal part! Our brains don't allow us to see animal parts as tools." How it would be possible for any creature to operate this way or why such stupidity would be naturally selected we are not told. 2. The artefacts that were created by these "Early Humans" were all of very similar nature. They were either handaxes and flakes with little variation. Why, then, does Mithen assume Neanderthals would have had the ability to create new artefacts out of new materials even if they could see a bone, antler or ivory as a new materials to work with? Do creativity, foresight and innovation magically appear when the "conceptual leap" is made of seeing a bone as a material for tool making? Neanderthals only made two types of artefacts and neither could be made from bone (using the same methods). So it seems the reason they didn't use bone was simply because it was an inappropriate material for the task! 3. Further, Mithen argues in his end notes that the creation of these artefacts required considerable intelligence because "one must continually modify one's plans due to the unpredictability of fracture" and therefore the process is incomparable to a bee making a complex honeycomb structure. Perhaps he does not realise how often you "modify your plans" during the "simple" act of walking or doing any mechanical task. The ability to modify one's plans does not make one's brain superduper intelligent -- it simply means a decision is being made. IF-THEN-ELSE, something that happens every second in every neuron in your little brain. Oh yeah, really complex stuff. Perhaps, just perhaps, it's true that making a handaxe requires more intelligence than making a bee's nest, but Mithen fails to give any good arguments for it. 4. Mithen talks as if the modules that make up "natural history intelligence" and "technical intelligence" do not change -- only the connections between them. What mechanism or evolutionary force would prevent these two "brain modules" interacting if their interaction could cause such an amazing change? 5. He says "this can only be explained by". THAT SERIOUSLY PISSES ME OFF! STOP IT! When you're saying some vague and shaky theory at least *TRY* to avoid saying "must conclude" and "can only be explained by", okay? If not for my sake, then for your children's and your children's children. You sounds like a pretentious .... Try pondering the idea that just maybe other conclusions could potentially be drawn from such simple ideas. 6. Neanderthals aren't even our ancestors, they simply share a common ancestor with modern humans. I learntthis from looking at his diagrams, but it seems to be a point the common reader should be pointed to a little more sharply. As they aren't our direct ancestors, we didn't evolve from them (obviously). Why is this important? Because it means modern humans may have NEVER had brains like theirs, as we didn't evolve from them, but rather from a common ancestor. Please don't think I'm just nitpicking on a single paragraph. Mithen makes similar outrageous and overly simplistic claims throughout the book with little or no argument to back himself up. He seems to view early human brains as half built cathedrals with missing windows and doors, gradually making their way to the higher goals of "art, religion and science" as if these things were obviously adaptive goals that any creature with its brain connected properly would set out to achieve. Mithen seems to forget that early humans consisted of completely functioning and adaptive species, instead he treats them as comical missing-links, or perhaps as modern humans that have been born lobotomised. If Mithen were an elephant he'd look at humans and say "... Well they certainly have had the opportunity eat more peanuts. We must conclude that they only see peanuts with their Religious Intelligence module or they would pick them off the ground with their noses and eat them. Sometimes we see them picking up nuts with their hands but this is either accidental or some strange offshoot of General Intelligence." Beside the content, his writing style is also poor. He creates confusing metaphors which either have to be explained by what they denote or are simply flogged to death and then have their meaning changed half way through the book anyway (eg a Swiss-army knife going from being a symbol of a mind with _distinguishable_ modules, to being a symbol of a mind with _disconnected_ modules). Overall the book reads more like a diary of an undeveloped hypothesis. It fails to to explain anything or put forward new theory. I did learn something about prehistoric humans, but I gained no insights into the mind. He does put one good question forward with his opening chapter, "Why ask an archaeologist about the human mind?" Why indeed. For insight into evolution and the human mind I'd suggest reading "The Selfish Gene" (Richard Dawkins) and "How the Mind Works" (Steven Pinker). I don't know of any good books on our closest ancestors, but this certainly isn't one.
Rating:
Summary: physical remains that illuminate the evolution of the mind
Review: Mithen does what you always want as a reader. He gives you the evidence he has used to reach his conclusions (including a wonderfully extensive set of footnotes). You may disagree or find his descriptive framework too generic as others have noted. But he has clearly described and marshalled as evidence for his arguments the physical remains of human evolution and culture from 4 million years ago to 40,000 years ago. This is a particularly fascinating period in the evolution of the mind since it starts without anything like human awareness and consciousness and ends up with the modern human mind. A lot of great books have been written about the last 50,000 years (i love Jared Diamond's books - particularly "The Third Chimpanzee"), but this was the first book that i found that did a nice job of laying the foundation from the archeological record on how the human mind reached this current state. Mithen in his subtitle offers to explain the origins of art, religion, and science. His model here is weak, as it does not provide the rigor to explain the development of religion or science, but i think he actually does do a nice job with how art may have evolved with the growing connection between previously separate areas of brain function. The book does have its faults. He uses two metaphors to organize his thinking: the various stages in the evolution of a cathederal and the progress through a play. His reliance on these metaphors becomes a little tedious, and his writing is sometimes repetitive. That said, this is a book that does a great job in filing in a fascinating period in "human" history: from 4 million years ago to 50,000 years ago. And, even if you disagree, Mithen provides enough evidence and documentation for the reader to enter into a dialogue.
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