capable of novelty—in a word, more open. Many scenarios of cultural
evolution give pride of place to this kind of cognitive breakthrough,
understood as a new capacity for symbolic reference and a newly
acquired flexibility in decoupled representations. As psychologist
Michael Tomasello argues, perspective-taking, which produces intu-
itive inferences on the reasons why others behave the way they do, was
crucial in this change. It was for instance indispensable in the domain
of technology. Modern human tools and tool usage show incremental,
cumulative change; the artifacts created required that cultural learners
could figure out other people's intentions. In many domains of
acquired culture it is simply not possible for developing subjects to [323]
consider cues provided by cultural elders and to produce relevant
inferences about them without representing those elders' communica-
tive intentions.
Archaeologist Steven Mithen proposes an even more precise descrip-
tion of the changes that led to modern culture. Mithen starts from the
description of the modern mind by evolutionary and developmental
psychologists, as consisting of a variety of specialized inference systems.
These systems have clear input conditions—that is, they only attend to
and handle information in a particular domain, such as intuitive physics,
intuitive psychology, but also more limited domains such as cues for
parental investment, mate-choice, coalition building, living-kind cate-
gorization, etc. For Mithen, the cultural explosion is the effect of signif-
icant changes in cognitive architecture, in particular the appearance of
cognitive fluidity—that is, of multiple information exchanges between
modular capacities. The difference between early and modern humans
is not so much in the operation of each specialized capacity (intuitive
biology, theory of mind, toolmaking, intuitive physics) as in the possibil-
ity to use information from one domain in the course of activities moni-
tored by another domain. So artifacts are used as body ornaments, serv-
ing social purposes; biological knowledge is used in visual symbols;
toolmaking develops local traditions and makes efficient use of local
resources, tapping information from intuitive biology.^7
Which is relevant to our question, because such transfers of infor-
mation between domains are exactly what supernatural concepts
require, as we saw in Chapter 2, and as Mithen himself points out. The
time when human brains established more connections between differ-
ent inference systems, as we know from hunting and toolmaking tech-
niques, was also the period when they created visual representations of
supernatural concepts. Cave paintings and other artifacts began to
WHYBELIEF?