Consciousness

introspection about their tool-making or for-
aging, but with increasing cognitive fluidity
the doors between the chapels opened, and
the truly modern human mind evolved, coin-
ciding with the cultural explosion of 60,000–
30,000 years ago. By then our ancestors had
already evolved big brains and language and
were physically similar to us.

For Mithen, language evolved to substitute
for grooming as the size of hominid social
groups increased (Dunbar, 1996). On this
theory, language was originally used only for
talking about social matters, and even today
the major topics of conversation between
both men and women can be classified as
‘gossip’: that is, people talk about who said
what to whom, who likes whom, and their
own and others’ status and relationships
(Dunbar, 1996). But once language had
evolved, it could be used for other purposes,
providing selection pressure to extend its
use to talk about other matters such as hunt-
ing, foraging, and the physical world. This,
argues Mithen, opened up the chapels of the
mind. We have now lost our Swiss-army-knife
minds and are conscious of much more than
the social world that gave rise to awareness
in the first place.

Other scientific theories also relate consciousness to our capacity for symbolic
thought, such as Terrence Deacon’s (1997) theory of how the coevolution of the
brain and language gave rise to the ‘symbolic species’, and Merlin Donald’s (2001)
theory of the coevolution of human brains, culture, and cognition. This associa-
tion with symbolic thought goes back at least to the ‘symbolic interactionism’ of
the American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead. Mead
argued that while other animals may be conscious, only humans have become
self-conscious, and this self-consciousness is built up first from gestures and
other nonsymbolic interactions and finally from the symbolic interactions made
possible by language. For Mead, as for Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, con-
sciousness came late in evolution and is fundamentally a social, not an individual,
construction.

An interesting implication of these social theories is that only intelligent and
highly social creatures can be conscious. These might include the other great
apes, and possibly elephants, wolves, and dolphins, but most creatures through-
out evolutionary history, and most alive today, would not be conscious at all.

One objection to Humphrey’s view is that introspection is unreliable. Even if we set
aside the misleading metaphor of inner vision, the activity of introspection is respon-
sible, for instance, for ‘convincing some people that their decisions have a kind of
freedom that is incompatible with physical causation, or giving the impression

10

thousand

years ago

100

thousand

years ago

1

million

years ago

10

million

years ago

100

million

years ago

Generalised type

of intelligence

Specialised type

of intelligence

H. habilis

Australopithecines

H. neanderthalensis

Archaic H. sapiens

Technical intelligence

Natural history

intelligence

Increasing

modu

lari

satio

n

Social intelligence

General intelligence

In

cre

asi

ngco

gnitive

flexibility

H. erectus

H. sapiens sapiens

Incre

asin

gco

gnit

ivef

luid

ity

FIGURE 11.6 • Mithen suggests that during the

evolution of the mind, selective

advantages have oscillated between

favouring specialised, hard-wired,

or modularised intelligence and

favouring general intelligence

(Mithen, 1996, p. 211).