A kangaroo goes into a bar and orders a scotch and soda. The barman serves him and says, “That will be £2.50”. Five minutes later the barman wanders over to his customer and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos in here”. The kangaroo says, “At £2.50 a drink, it’s no wonder”. According to the archaeologist Steven Mithen a member of the species Homo neanderthalensis could not have come up with this joke, and not only because there were no bars around in their day. Although they had large brains and well‐developed “specialized intelligences” ‐ for example, natural history intelligence and social intelligence ‐ Neanderthals lacked the “cognitive fluidity” between them that this joke depends on. This last feature manifested itself between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago, after five million years of human evolution, in the minds of the relatively new species known as Homo sapiens sapiens, as a result of “a switch from a social to general‐purpose language” and the development of “reflexive consciousness”out of their need to predict the behaviour of their fellows. As well as humour, cognitive fluidity accounts for art, religion, science, racist attitudes, and, I suppose, books about the mind.
The seed of The Prehistory of the Mind was sown in 1988, when Sir John Lyons asked the author if he had read Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983). Dr Mithen agrees with Fodor that the most distinctive feature of human beings is their “passion for the analogous”, which reminded me of Aristotle’s remark that “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (Poetics). Among the 600 items in the bibliography is Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation (1964), which came into my mind at several points. There are 34 pages of notes and further reading; the late Ernest Gellner claimed that people who live in traditional societies have much more flexible minds than urban‐dwelling Westerners: it is “the neat and logical division of labour” characteristic of the West “which is the anomaly and which needs explaining”[1]. Our bodies are adapted to the lifestyle of Pleistocene hunter‐gatherers, which implies that we should be eating “wild game, nuts, fruit and fresh vegetables”, and not sitting around drinking scotch and soda.
Dr Mithen sees human evolution as a Shakespearian drama (although a very long and largely tedious one) and our minds as Gothic cathedrals. At one point he cites Richard Dawkins’ famous metaphor of “the blind watchmaker”, but he sometimes writes as if there is a far‐seeing super‐intelligence at work: on language, he writes that “Natural selection, the most important architect of the mind, simply would not have allowed this opportunity to...increase reproductive success …to pass by”.
Homo neanderthalensis had a “Swiss‐Army‐knife” mentality; the separateness of their technical intelligence from their natural history intelligence accounts for the fact that they made tools out of stone and wood rather than bone and ivory. In a chapter entitled “Trying to think like a Neanderthal” Dr Mithen suggests that we think about the affliction known as petit mal and the way modern humans drive cars while absorbed in conversation with their companions. Anyhow, we moderns can get only a fleeting glimpse of what it was like to be a Neanderthal, because our minds are fundamentally different.
This modern human finds it impossible to imagine how his ancestors survived 120,000 years of intermittent ice ages without books, scotch, or a sense of humour.
