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Book review |
THE FIRST IDEA: HOW SYMBOLS, LANGUAGE AND INTELLIGENCE EVOLVED FROM OUR PRIMATE ANCESTORS TO MODERN HUMANS
Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker
2004. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press
Price UK £14.99, US $25.00
ISBN 0-7382-0680-6
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‘Talking up the use of language’
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The attempt to define and perhaps understand what it is to be human within a broadly scientific perspective is less than 150 years old. For the anthropologist as for the archaeologist, the annus mirabilis was 1859, when the ‘Antiquity of Man’ was definitely recognized and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. The former, by recognizing the vast antiquity of the chipped stone tools found in the gravel pits of the Somme valley (long predating any estimate for the biblical Creation as narrated in the Book of Genesis) cleared a space of time in which the process of becoming human could take place. The latter, in outlining the central process of development by which living things are related, carried implications for the emergence of humankind which were later spelled out explicitly in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871). Since that time we have learned a great deal about the fossil
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge and Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK