Preface

When I finished writing Social anthropology and human origins, I wanted to explore one area of human origins in greater depth. The earlier book looked to a great extent at primates, fossil hominins and the archaeology of humans living long before language, art, symbolism or religion. It touched too on these later developments, but the present subject, the genesis of symbolic thought, cries out more than any other for engagement with social anthropology. It is as much part of our discipline as it is of any other, and exploring it is not only to the benefit of, say, archaeology, but also to the benefit of social anthropology itself. Indeed, the genesis of symbolic thought is not even always in the past: symbolic thought is generated every time a person thinks symbolically. In this book, though, I am concerned primarily with new developments in the study of human origins. Much of what I say also reflects both on humanity's present and on anthropology's glorious past.

Proto-humans certainly had, in some sense, sophisticated communications skills with which to deal with practical matters. They had collective behaviour: they had society. They also had ‘culture’, but they did not think symbolically. The origin of symbolic thought is one of the great questions of social anthropology, as indeed it is of archaeology. However, for the last hundred years or so, mainstream social anthropology has not confronted it. When last we did, both social and biological anthropology and archaeology too were very, very different from what they are now. Intelligence was being measured with callipers, and we were being told that the missing link was a strapping young Englishman called Eoanthropus dawsoni, with a big head and an ape-like jaw, who long ago lived on the Sussex Downs and played cricket. This book is a twenty-first-century history of the last 200,000 years, and more significantly (at my guess) the last 130,000 years or so, when humans began to think symbolically.