2009 Rhind Lecture 5: Evolutionary context: the emergence of the modern human mind
Fifth lecture by Professor Trevor Watkins of the 2009 Rhind Lectures, entitled “New Light on the Dawn: a new perspective on the Neolithic Revolution in Southwest Asia”.
The 2009 Rhind Lectures, entitled “New Light on the Dawn: a new perspective on the Neolithic Revolution in Southwest Asia” and presented by Emeritus Professor Trevor Watkins, Honorary Professorial Fellow of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, were the first to be recorded by the Society.
2009 Rhind Lecture 5: “Evolutionary context: the emergence of the modern human mind” by Prof Trevor Watkins
Hominid evolution has increasingly focused on the brain (or the capacity of the human mind) and the formation of larger, more robust, more deeply cooperative human communities. The construction and maintenance of human communities depends on our capacity for operating in terms of symbols, and systems of symbolic representation such as language. Physically, Homo sapiens in particular has evolved very little within the short time that the species has been around; but human communities have acquired more and more powerful skills in using symbolic culture. There is a school of thought that believes that humans reached their optimal symbolic cultural capacity in the two- and three-dimensional art of the so-called ‘Upper Palaeolithic revolution’. Another school of thought claims that literacy and the ability to record and tele-communicate across space and time is the critically important faculty. Here, a case is made for an intermediate revolution. The art of the Upper Palaeolithic and its precursors can be regarded as only the beginnings, akin to the first utterances of single words by human infants. Around the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene (the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic in southwest Asia) human communities graduated to the fully symbolic use of culture, a level of cognitive and cultural facility that was essential to the formation of large-scale communities and extensive networks of interaction – in fact, societies like our owns.
Recorded in the Royal Society of Edinburgh auditorium at 2pm on 5th April 2009 using Camtasia software from Techsmith