In the Mind's Eye: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Evolution of Human Cognition

✍ Scribed by 

April Nowell (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 214
• Series: International Monographs in Prehistory: Archaeological Series; 13
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The last decade has witnessed a sophistication and proliferation in the number of studies focused on the evolution of human cognition, reflecting a renewed interest in the evolution of the human mind in anthropology and in many other disciplines. The complexity and enormity of this topic requires the coordinated efforts of many researchers. This volume brings together the disciplines of palaeontology, psychology, anatomy, and primatology. Together, they address a number of issues, including the evolution of sex differences in spatial cognition, the role of archaeology in the cognitive sciences, the relationships between brain size, cranial reorganization and hominid cognition, and the role of language and information processing in human evolution.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Forward: The Archaeology of Intelligence
Introduction
Part I. Archaeology and Cognitive Science
1. The Role of Archaeology in Cognitive Science
2. The Re-Emergence of Cognitive Archaeology
Part II: On the Ground: Interpreting Material and Non-Material Artifacts
3. Memories Out of Mind: The Archaeology of the Oldest Artificial Memory Systems
4. A Pragmatic View of the Emergence of Paleolithic Symbol-Using
5. Nonmaterial Artifacts: Retelling the Natural History of Artifacts and Mind
Part III: Paleoneurology
6. Archaeological Implications of Paleoneurology
7. Intellectual Surplusage: The Role of Bipedalism and Neonatal Head Trauma
8. Before or After the Split? Hominid Neural Specializations
Part IV: Information Processing in Human Evolution
9. Multilevel Information Processing, Archaeology, and Evolution
10. Behavioral Response to Variable Pleistocene Landscapes
11. The Fossil Evidence for the Evolution of Human Intelligences in Pleistocene Homo
Part V: A Final Word: The Origins of Language
12. On the Neural Bases of Spoken Language
13. Discovering the Symbolic Potential of Communicative Signs: The Origins of Speaking a Language