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Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

This chapter introduces the fragmentation premise — the idea that the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects ‘after the break’ was a common practice in the past. It also summarizes the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world. Following the philosopher David Bohm, the discussion supports the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects, and compares Bohm's three-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution and Donald's model of external symbolic storage.

This chapter offers an overview of the cognitive principles of art, the origins of art, and the cognitive function of art. Art is an activity that arises in the context of human cultural and cognitive evolution. Its sources include not only the most abstract integrative regions of the brain but also the communities of mind within which artists and audiences live. Certain assumptions are made. First, art should be regarded as a specific kind of cognitive engineering. Second, art is always created in the context of distributed cognition. Third, art is constructivist in nature, aimed at the deliberate refinement and elaboration of mental models and worldviews. Fourth, most art is metacognitive in nature. Metacognition is, by definition, self-reflection. Fifth, art is a technology-driven aspect of cognition. Sixth, the role of the artist, viewed as a component in a distributed cognitive system, is not necessarily fixed. Seventh, art is always aimed at a cognitive outcome.

The hunting patterns of several species of felid and canid are important for social reasons and cooperative ones also, of course. What differentiates the human approach compared to the animal approach is the level of cognitive sophistication at which social integration operates. There is at least one aspect with which this chapter means to convey the expression ‘deep social mind’. The chapter treats three aspects of deep social mind. Firstly it looks at cooperation. Hominid cooperation became unusually deep in several respects, including coordination in such enterprises as hunting. Second, it examines culture. Finally it looks at mind-reading. The chapter uses several different sources of evidence to reconstruct aspects of hominid social and cognitive evolution. One is on hunter-gatherer societies. By examining the hunting-gathering way of life across many different geographical locations and local conditions, we can search for those cognitive and social features they share, which are thus revealed as the core adaptations involved when humans live by gathering and hunting.

Among the animal species that share some kind of common ancestor with humans there are many, in addition to the four species of great ape that apparently also share some kind of intelligence. Such shared intelligence might be due to common descent in some; in others it might be due to convergence — common evolutionary processes operating on a common inheritance, but independently. The argument of this chapter is that understanding intelligence in these more remote relatives has something to contribute to the understanding of the hominid mind. It outlines a few basic principles of modern evolutionary theory. It also considers what might form the common cognitive inheritance of all mammals, and therefore the foundation on which the extraordinary cognitive evolution of the primates must have been built. The chapter considers where else in the animal kingdom human-like intelligence can be found, so that we can consider what selective pressures might have been critical in recent hominid evolution.

This chapter examines maternal effects in human cognitive evolution. It discusses the changes in social intelligence and argues that the confluence of increased brain size, delayed maturation, and social complexity contributes to the changing nature of mental representation, and that this was most critical in the social realm. This chapter also discusses the possible influence that mothers had in affecting social-cognitive changes over the course of human evolution and argues that mothers are a central component to the developmental systems.

Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.

This chapter first establishes a ‘baseline’ of animal cognition, against which to compare the cognition of great apes. The proper group to use for this is the Old World monkeys, diverging from the ape line at about 30 Ma. Then, evidence that great apes differ cognitively from monkeys is reviewed. Unfortunately, as yet the picture of cognitive differences between the various great apes is sketchy; the pattern seen in recent years is for an ability, first detected with the much-studied common chimpanzee, to be later found in other, and perhaps all, ape species. Once the genuine differences among the apes are worked out, it will be possible to trace human cognitive evolution in some detail from 14 Ma to 5 Ma, but at present this would be premature speculation.

There are consistent individual differences in human intelligence, attributable to a single ‘general intelligence’ factor, g. The evolutionary basis of g and its links to social learning and culture remain controversial. Conflicting hypotheses regard primate cognition as divided into specialized, independently evolving modules versus a single general process. To assess how processes underlying culture relate to one another and other cognitive capacities, we compiled ecologically relevant cognitive measures from multiple domains, namely reported incidences of behavioural innovation, social learning, tool use, extractive foraging and tactical deception, in 62 primate species. All exhibited strong positive associations in principal component and factor analyses, after statistically controlling for multiple potential confounds. This highly correlated composite of cognitive traits suggests social, technical and ecological abilities have coevolved in primates, indicative of an across-species general intelligence that includes elements of cultural intelligence. Our composite species-level measure of general intelligence, ‘primate g_S’, covaried with both brain volume and captive learning performance measures. Our findings question the independence of cognitive traits and do not support ‘massive modularity’ in primate cognition, nor an exclusively social model of primate intelligence. High general intelligence has independently evolved at least four times, with convergent evolution in capuchins, baboons, macaques and great apes.

This chapter examines selective benefits of musical behaviours and the role of music in human evolution. It discusses the differences between selection for the capacities for the behaviours and selection for musical behaviours as a whole in the context of their cultural practice. It also describes two different aspects of music in evolution: the adaptive rationales for the practice of musical behaviours and the role of musical behaviours in models of cognitive evolution. This chapter suggests that musical behaviours could be valuable not only as means of exploring social interactions, but also as a vicarious stimulus and exercise of those capacities, in a more indirect way.

In this chapter, the authors argue that technical cognition can best be understood as a variety of expert performance, or expertise. Expert performances are grounded in a cognitive system in which well-learned routines and procedures held in long-term memory are rapidly accessed in working memory using retrieval structures, which are themselves well-learned sets of cues stored in long-term memory and activated in working memory. Retrieval structures provide a flexible, alinguistic form of thinking able to respond almost instantly to a huge variety of task-specific problems. However, expertise requires years of practice to attain. Technical expertise evolved over the course of hominin evolution primarily through the expansion of long-term memory, but also through the enhancement of working memory capacity. It was not until comparatively late in hominin evolution that archaeology provides examples of technical systems that required cognitive resources beyond the scope of expert cognition.

Stone tools have a continuous record extending some 3.3 million years. Our hominin ancestors engaged in relatively simple stone flaking, and stone tools of extreme complexity were produced by cognitively modern humans in the Pleistocene and Holocene. For this reason, stone tools offer a tangible means for tracking the evolution of cognition in our genus. This chapter discusses a recent series of experiments controlled for modern flintknapper intent, the results suggesting that aspects of ancient tool forms sometimes viewed as deliberate can in fact be produced with no more intention than that seen in the removal of individual flakes. But the removal of individual flakes is itself a cognitively challenging task, one that places the earliest hominin flintknappers across the “cognitive Rubicon” from their primate relatives.

This chapter discusses the need to describe and measure the intelligence of various animals in order to use the comparative method to reconstruct cognitive evolution in humans. Especially, information on the relative intelligence of strepsirhines, New and Old World monkeys, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and the two species of chimpanzees is needed to cover the succession of early ancestors of humans that must have existed. It sounds straightforward, put like that, but it is not.

Understanding the cognitive abilities of ancestral hominins remains challenging, despite the many advances of recent years, including new fossil discoveries and paleogenetic data. However, the primary route to accessing the behavioral and cognitive worlds of our hominin ancestors still remains firmly rooted in the archaeological record, particularly stone tools, the direct products of hominin actions grounded in the physical, social, and cognitive worlds occupied by the knappers. A theory of mind (ToM) has long been considered a key component of the human condition, linked to both language and the development of abstract thought. There must therefore be a point (or perhaps multiple points) in our evolutionary history when hominins gained a ToM. This ability should, in turn, be reflected in the archaeological record. To date, however, only limited attempts have been made to correlate the two. This chapter thus explores the relationship between the various stone tool traditions and ToM.

This chapter explores the conjecture that tool use helped lay the foundations of key properties of modern minds: propositional meaning; wisdom and intuitions about meanings with their ineffable qualities and links to emotion; and our ability to walk, talk, and think about meanings at the same time. People need to react to similar things with similar thoughts and behaviors (generalization), while reacting to different things with different thoughts and behaviors. Differentiation within the behavioral systems of ancestral species must have advanced in tandem with differentiation of their mental and neural systems. Tool use clearly contributed to that differentiation. Such differentiation creates new challenges for grasping what mental states underpinning perception, the control of vocal and physical actions, and bodily reactions all have in common. The emergence of two meaning systems in a specific architectural arrangement is one plausible evolutionary response to those challenges.

Theory of mind—the ability to reason about the thoughts and emotions of others—is central to what makes us human. Chimpanzees too appear to understand some psychological states. While less is known about bonobos, several lines of evidence suggest that the social-cognitive abilities of the two sister taxa may differ in key respects. This chapter outlines a framework to guide future research on bonobo social cognition based on the predictions of two potentially complementary hypotheses. The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that selection against aggression and for prosociality in bonobos may have impacted the ontogeny of their social-cognitive skills relative to chimpanzees. The empathizing–systemizing hypothesis links degree of prenatal brain masculinization, a potential result of self-domestication, to adult cognition. Specifically, relative feminization may yield more flexible theory of mind skills in bonobos than chimpanzees. Finally, directions for future study, including development of new paradigms that maximize ecological validity for bonobos, are discussed. La théorie de l’esprit—le pouvoir de raisonner les pensées et émotions des autres—est centrale à notre nature humaine. Il parait que les chimpanzés peuvent comprendre quelques états psychologiques. Tandis que nous savons moins des bonobos, plusieurs témoignages suggèrent que les capacités socio-cognitives des deux taxons soeur peuvent différer dans des aspects clefs. Nous traçons un cadre pour guider les prochaines recherches sur la cognition sociale des bonobos, basé sur les prédictions de deux hypothèses potentiellement complémentaires. L’hypothèse d’auto-domestication suggère que l’anti-agression et la prosocialité des bonobos a influé leur ontogenèse et leur capacités socio-cognitives relativement aux chimpanzés. L’hypothèse d’empathie systématique (Empathizing–Systemizing) forme un lien entre le degré de masculinisation prénatale du cerveau, le résultat potentiel d’auto-domestication, et la cognition adulte. Spécifiquement, la féminisation relative génère des théories de l’esprit plus flexibles chez les bonobos que chez les chimpanzés. Enfin, nous discutons le directions pour les prochaines études, inclut le développement de nouveaux paradigmes qui maximisent la validité écologique des bonobos.

Important areas for future developments of game theory in biology are put forward. These include several issues that are dealt with in the book, such as trait co-evolution, the consequences of variation, time structure, and the embedding of games into an ecological context and into the lives of individuals. New areas are also suggested, with Tinbergen’s four questions about the study of animal behaviour serving as a starting point. Game theory could be combined with phylogenetic analysis by examining how Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESSs) might change over evolutionary time, including major shifts between different ESSs, which might correspond to different species over evolutionary time. Concerning behavioural mechanisms in large worlds, the question of which mechanism parameters that are tuned by evolution is addressed, with a brief summary of the current knowledge about comparative cognition. The possible importance of limited flexibility in mechanisms is illustrated by outlining a model of a trust game. Finally, the potential for game theory to contribute to the study of cognitive development is discussed, using mutualism between cleaner fish and their client fish as an illustration.

Dennett argues that Darwinism provides a universal theory of adaptation and improvement in design. In his “Tower of Generate and Test,” Dennett distinguishes four kinds of creatures that realize a Darwinian pattern on different scales and with different degrees of sophistication: Darwinian, Skinnerian, Popperian, and Gregorian creatures. I examine Dennett’s tower in the light of recent work on learning, and in the context of the phylogenetic tree. A class of associative learners—Humean organisms—probably lies between Dennett’s Darwinian and Skinnerian creatures. Various cognitive capacities are also more demanding than instrumental conditioning, but insufficient for Popperian cognition in Dennett’s sense. Creatures corresponding to these intermediate stages are named—Carnapian, Pearlian, Tolmanian. These stages are not arranged in a tower.