The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience

The Sapient Mind Archaeology Meets Neuroscience The turn of the twenty first century has seen a new era in the cognitive and brain sciences that allows us to address the age old question of what it means to be human from a whole new range of differ

The turn of the twenty first century has seen a new era in the cognitive and brain sciences that allows us to address the age old question of what it means to be human from a whole new range of different perspectives Our knowledge of the workings of the human brain increases day by day and so does our understanding of the extended, distributed, embodied and culturally medThe turn of the twenty first century has seen a new era in the cognitive and brain sciences that allows us to address the age old question of what it means to be human from a whole new range of different perspectives Our knowledge of the workings of the human brain increases day by day and so does our understanding of the extended, distributed, embodied and culturally mediated character of the human mind The problem is that these major ways of thinking about human cognition and the threads of evidence that they carry with them often seem to diverge, rather than confront one another The Sapient Mind channels the huge emerging analytic potential of current neuroscientific research in the direction of a common integrated programme targeting the big picture of human cognitive evolution Up to now, working in isolation, both archaeology and neuroscience have made a number of important contributions to the study of human intelligence Archaeology, for instance has given us a good idea about where, and an approximate idea about when, Homo sapiens appeared in Africa somewhere between 100 000 and 200 000 years ago Neuroscience, on the other hand, has given us a good indication about where in the human brain modern human capacities e.g language, symbolic capacity, representational ability, theory of mind ToM , causal belief, intentionality, sense of selfhood can be identified and the possible neural networks and co