awake Sticking with Brian Fagan's Cro-Magnon, the following is from a chapter on the Neanderthals. After discussing the idea of Neanderthal speech and ultimately judging it not likely, he writes:
What, then, about the Neanderthal mind? In some respects, the Neanderthals appear remarkably modern. They fashioned complex artifacts, hunted all manner of game, and survived through major climactic shifts for more than 200,000 years. Yet they lacked speech, and their culture was effectively unchanged over hundreds of thousands of years. There are no signs that they were capable of symbolic or theoretical cognition. Mithen has another theory. He argues that Neanderthals had what he calls a "domain-specific intelligence." They had vast stores of knowledge about the natural world and reacted to it in near-modern ways. They had excellent technical skills for making sophisticated tools; their social relationships were both complex and continually maintained. But they were never able to use their technical skills to make artifacts to mediate these social relationships, such as clothing or jewelry. Nor did they design specialized hunting weapons like those of modern humans, because they were incapable of bringing together their technical expertise and knowledge of their prey in a single conceptual thought. They never fabricated a weapon specifically for use against a particular animal, nor did they make the kinds of multicomponent artifacts used by their modern successors.
As Mithen points out, what the Neanderthals lacked were the additional neural circuits in the brain that would have connected toolmaking, socializing, and human interactions with the natural world. The archaeologist Thomas Wynn and the psychologist Frederick Coolidge have suggested that the missing circuits were those related to working memory, those that would have allowed them to retain several kinds of information in active attention simultaneously. This was why, Mithen speculates, Neanderthals expressed complex emotions and information about the natural world through sophisticated iconic gestures, dance, vocal imitation, and song, but their communication system was one of relatively fixed utterances that helped perpetuate conservative thought and a static culture.
As Mithen points out, what the Neanderthals lacked were the additional neural circuits in the brain that would have connected toolmaking, socializing, and human interactions with the natural world. The archaeologist Thomas Wynn and the psychologist Frederick Coolidge have suggested that the missing circuits were those related to working memory, those that would have allowed them to retain several kinds of information in active attention simultaneously. This was why, Mithen speculates, Neanderthals expressed complex emotions and information about the natural world through sophisticated iconic gestures, dance, vocal imitation, and song, but their communication system was one of relatively fixed utterances that helped perpetuate conservative thought and a static culture.
References:
Coolidge, Frederick L., and Thomas Wynn. The Rise of Homo Sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames and Hudson, 1996).
Coolidge, Frederick L., and Thomas Wynn. The Rise of Homo Sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames and Hudson, 1996).