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.
Rating: 
Summary: Metaphorical melange
Review: Mithen makes a valiant effort to establish the evolutionary roots of human intelligence. It's a complicated task, with so little physical evidence to support his endeavour. Still, he uses what there is with commendable ability. In presenting the development of intelligence, he falls back on three metaphorical images - the Swiss Army Knife, cathedral architecture and a dramatic play. The Swiss Army knife is a collection of specialized tools, each applied without relation to the others. You don't decork a wine bottle while trimming your fingernails. The cathedral is comprised of a central nave with connecting chapels. The chapels only connect to each other as intelligence develops. The drama is the history of hominid evolution, vague and obscure in the beginning, growing more discernible with more fossil evidence. As with most cognitive studies, Mithen's book summarizes what is known of the similarity of chimpanzee [our nearest relative] intellect and abilities in contrast with our own. As do many of his colleagues, he finds our primate cousins lacking in all but minimal skills. With the chimpanzees thus disposed of, he moves to examine the hominid record. This is the great strength of this work. Instead of the usual tactic of portraying what is known of today's human intellect and projecting backward, Mithen starts at the beginnings of human evolution to carry his argument forward. Along the way he utilizes anthropology, morphological studies, even climate and geography. He uses evidence well, assuming little and carefully building the model. Key points in the narrative are two periods of hominid brain enlargement, which he uses to enhance his model of special "intelligences." With the earliest hominids having only a Swiss Army knife array of mental tools, each segment of intelligence had to develop independent of the others. According to Mithen, this situation led to each "tool" building a separate "chapel" in the mind. Based on a central "nave" of "general" intelligence - keeping the body going, food gathering, sex - new intelligences would arise around it. These new intelligences are technical, natural, social and linguistic. Each operated independently of the others, so that tool-making enhanced "technical" intelligence, while learning about bird migration or fruiting seasons developed "natural" intelligence. The Swiss Army knife aspect prevented these intelligences from interacting until the emergence of Homo sapiens. Then, according to Mithen, a "cognitive fluidity" tore through the walls of the "intelligence chapels" to acquire the broad range of abilities the mind exhibits today. While direct evidence of all this activity is, necessarily missing, the forceful presentation and elegant logic make it all a captivating read. It's easy to critique Mithen's thesis. All you need is a competitive model of cognition. However, that would be unfair to what he has achieved, a carefully synthesized model of how human intelligence developed. Even without bringing in a competitive thesis, Mithen falls down in two important areas. After lengthy discussion of tool-making enhancing "technical" intelligence and its role in developing hunter-gatherer societies, he blithely omits any input from the "gathering" half of those communities. While rarely mentioning that tool-makers/hunters are almost exclusively male, even among chimpanzees, he restricts mention of female roles to the need to give birth to small-headed babies. He also depicts the changing of "social" intelligence associated with grooming in early hominids to the development of speech later. He ignores the possibility that speech is just as likely to have arisen within the community of females, who had greater reason to utilize it. The second major flaw is his conclusion on how modern minds evolved from earlier ones. He argues that the "social" intelligence became the tool that opened the walls of his "intelligence chapels" of the cathedral. Since there is no reason to believe that intelligence should be so pigeon-holed as Mithen makes it, "social intelligence" as an integrating force is vague at best. Although i promised not to employ a competitive thesis, it's difficult not to refer the reader to Daniel C. Dennett's Multiple Drafts model of consciousness. If Mithen had consulted Dennett's Consciousness Explained, instead of blithely dismissing it, he would have discovered that his cathedral and chapels would have been built up over time instead of needing serious renovation at the end. Mithen would have been able to use the same evidence, indeed, the same metaphors, but with progressive construction instead of building then redecorating. Knocking down mental walls is not a satisfactory technique to build intellect. Instead, Mithen should have kept the theatre metaphor, which he restricts to history, and built up his drama from a soliloquy to a full cast epic. That would have allowed him to enlarge mental capacities through new players, scenery changes, improved interaction among the cast, perhaps with himself taking the final bow. Given the work he's obviously put into this and the wealth of evidence he's considered and offered us, a smattering of applause [after a careful reading of the libretto] is not out of order.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: This is a great book, and along with M. Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind, the most comprehensive and plausible theories of the evolution of the mind. I leave out of this comment evolutionary psychologists, like Pinker or Tooby and Cosmides, because they focus on the results of evolution, not the process itself. Mithen's point is that to fully understand the modern mind and its origins, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and neuroscience are not enough (these are the classical fields, theres of course sociology, AI, etc...) but that archeology has something to add as well. In fact, as he shows, it is a fundamentlal piece of the puzzle to understand the archeological history of primates in order to see what that has to say about the changes the mind went through across evolution. When others might have focused on language, and its origins, Mithen focuses on the actual evidence: bone remains, ancient tools, etc. Mithen thus divides the evolution of man and his mind in stages, four of them, starting with the common ancestor of man and ape, about 6 million years ago, then with H. Habilis, then H. Erectus and the Nearthentals and finally with, well, us, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Mithen basically argues that the mind and its evolution can be understood on the context of the modularity-workspace models of the mind, and that changes in the mind across evolution are simply changes in the interactions (and appearence, existence, use or disuse) of these mental modules and the workspace (which he calls general intelligence). The modules are natural history intelligence, technical intelligence, Social intelligence and language. This approach works well, and for example, shows that the difference between say, an ape (the model for our common ancestor) and a Nearthental, mindwise, is just that while the ape has general intelligence, well developed social intelligence (apes live in groups and interact a lot), their technical and natural intelligences are rather poor (they struggle to build tools, to say the least). Language is, although this point is controversial, absent. The nearthantal, with his natural and technical intelligence almost as developed as his social intelligence (they migrated, had hunting strategies, knew to forage well, built "complex" tools) and language, would have a much more complex or closer to modern mind. This example is an oversimplification of course, but examplifies Mithens strategy adequately. In similar fashion, Mithen describes the differences and reasons for these differences, in the minds of primates, hominids, and finally man, as well as the gradual change from ape-mind to human-mind. Things in the book, and theoretically, get interesting when H. Sapiens arrives. The difference is not only on how developed the modules or the workspace is, but how these interact. So, the modern mind is what it is because natural science intelligence say, can interact with language and with social and technical intelligence as well. Thus men might want to depict animals (natural) on walls by drawing them (technical) for social purposes. Thus the origins of art. In a similar way, religion appeared. The appearance of pathways across modules and general intelligence, building a meta-workspace, argues Mithen, is the cause of the cultural explotion, of the modern mind. This is again oversimplified, but Mithen does a good job of arguing for why and how this came about. As an interesting note, Mithen talks of consicousness's possible role as an integrator of distributed information in the modules. Consciousness is to Mithen present on the modules by themselves, and thus argues H. Habilis was in that sense consicous, but sees reflexive consciousness as taking its modern form by the addition of connections between modules, the creation of a meta-workspace. This is in close and curious agreement with Baars theory of consicousness, or with neurocognitive workspace models of consciousness (Dehaene's The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness). In closing, this book does much in adding to our understanding of the evolution of the mind, and thus should be read by anyone interested in this most precious aspect of hman life.
Rating:
Summary: Illuminating theory of the evolution of human intelligence
Review: This is a wonderful book. It starts with the question of whether we are fundamentally different from chimpanzies in the way our mind works. Taking the perspective of an archaeologist, and blending that with the views of evolutionary biology and of human developmental psychology and cognitive science, Mithen spins an extroadinary tale. The earliest and most primative primates probably had most of their cognitive world "hard-wired." They had all the specific knowledge they needed for survival. Primates really took off from the rest of the mammals when we developed "general intelligence," which could learn from trial and error, and which could make generalizations based on experience. However, this general intelligence was slow in acquiring new knowledge. To accomplish that, specialized intelligences, or programs, needed to evolve. The first of these was social intelligence, which was the specialized ability to read and understand social heirarchies. Early empathy and the ability to infer from your own experience what other members of your species were thinking and feeling was the greatest power this new intelligence conferred, and became the origin of consciousness. The second specialized intelligence was that of natural biology. This was very helpful in expanding our observations of the world, and increased the food sources which were available to primitive ancestors of homo sapiens. The third specialized intelligence was technical intelligence. This enabled early man to fashion tools and to use them in ever more complex ways.To these three intelligences -- psychology, biology, and physics, so to speak -- was added linguistic intelligence. This gave the conscious mind a voice. It also enhanced the other three intelligences, especially social intelligence. Prior to the evolution of linguistic intelligence, peer communication was mostly visual and tactile. Speech was much more efficient than grooming in building and maintaining social bonds. It was also linguistic intelligence that made possible the next great leap to meta-intelligence.Linking the four specialized intelligences, there evolved during the period leading up to 40,000 years ago, a supraordinate intelligence which permitted what we might now call multitasking, or integration among the other specialized intelligences. We see the first evidence of this in the bursting forth of art and religion at that time. None of these appear to have been present prior to that time.Much like a simple computer, the earliest primates had a set of basic information. Then came a generalized processor. To this were added specialized programs for psychology, biology, physics, and language. Finally, true homo sapiens developed a metaprogram linking the others and permitting genuine creativity to take off.Unlike most popular books on science for the educated layperson, Mithen does not go in for much chit chat. This is a pet peave of mine in other books, such as "Sex on the Brain," or "Why We Age." Too much irrelevant material on the appearance and personal quirks of the scientists and not enough of the science. Not so here. The writing is only a tiny bit repetitious, and is generally excellent.A few other brief notes. Mithen explains some of the subtler aspects of upright posture, such as taking less direct sun, which permits foraging in the middle of the day. He addresses the role of a meat diet compared to a vegetarian one. He also demonstrates conclusively that while chimps and other primates have certain things in common with us, human intelligence is truly a unique phenomenon.
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