A Brainy Book

We need to keep up with information such as that from the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting in Montreal, Marach 30-April 4. A couple items from this meeting appear here (_Science News_ v. 165, 4/17/04, p. 254). The book review/advertising section has one that might be of interest.

A Brief History of the Mind: from Apes to Intellect and Beyond by William H. Calvin claims to do for the story of human evolution what Stephen Hawking did for the story of cosmic evolution.

Calvin "considers how the human mind has developed over the past 7 million years." He's not an anthropologist or paleontologist, he's a neurobiologist, so he focuses on brains. Supposedly our ancestors experienced "a brain-volume growth spurt about 750,000 years ago, when hominids developed advanced hunting techniques and formed protolanguages."

Let's see, so after figuring out how to chip rocks into sharp-edged tools and even which rocks made the best tools, it only took them another...1,750,000 years to figure out how to organize a hunting party and make some sounds indicating "You go around behind those critters and scare them this way." Swift.

Calvin also argues that what really kicked things off was when "human brains reached their current size" which he says happened "about 50,000 years ago, when homo sapiens began speaking in sentences." I wonder if he dug up an old tape recording or something. Good grief.

Until Next Time,

David Bump