What happened in the origin of human consciousness?

Abstract

At some point in its evolutionary history, our species Homo sapiens ceased to be a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic organism, living in the world as presented to it by Nature, and instead began to exist in a world that it reconstructs in its own mind. Most scientists since Darwin have been content to explain this extraordinary transformation in human consciousness by the operation of natural selection. However, the human fossil and archaeological records indicate that modern human symbolic consciousness is not the culmination of the long trend that natural selection would predict. Instead, it shows that major change in the human past has been episodic and rare and that, as far as can be determined from the archaeological record, the passage from nonsymbolic to symbolic cognition is a recent event as well as an unprecedented one. So recent, indeed, that it significantly postdates the acquisition of modern human anatomy as expressed in skeletal structure. It, thus, appears most likely that the biological (neural) capacity underwriting the radically new behavioral mode arose as an incidental exaptation in the same process that produced the new skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, but that it lay unexpressed until it was "discovered" by means of a cultural innovation, plausibly the invention of language. As in the case of the modern anatomical structure, it appears that the new capacity was initially expressed in Africa and that its various behavioral potentials were sequentially discovered in a drawn-out process that is continuing today. An "accidental" origin of the human capacity helps understand why so many human behaviors have proven self-destructive and contradictory, a feature of our species that reductionist, selection-based scenarios are hard-put to explain.

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