Homo symbolicus : the dawn of language, imagination and spirituality / edited by Christopher S. Henshilwood, Francesco d'Errico.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The emergence of symbolic culture, classically identified with the European cave paintings of the Ice Age, is now seen, in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries, as a complex nonlinear process taking root in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. In this book the archaeologists responsible for some of these new discoveries, flanked by ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission, evolutionary psychologists modelling the emergence of metarepresentations, as well as biologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists and an astronomer combine their research findings. Their results call into question our very conception of human nature and animal behaviour, and they create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage's cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them.

Print version record.

Pan symbolicus: a cultural primatologists viewpoint / William C. McGrew -- The evolution of the rise of human language: carry the baby / E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & William M. Fields -- The origin of symbolically mediated behaviour: from antagonistic scenarios to a unified research strategy / Francesco d'Errico & Christopher S. Henshilwood -- Middle Stone Age engravings and their significance to the debate on the emergence of symbolic material culture / Christopher S. Henshilwood & Francesco d'Errico -- Complex cognition required for compound adhesive manufacture in the Middle Stone Age implies symbolic capacity / Lyn Wadley -- The emergence of language, art and symbolic thinking: a Neandertal test of competing hypotheses / João Zilhão -- The human major transition in relation to symbolic behaviour, including language, imagination, and spirituality / David Sloan Wilson -- The living as symbols, the dead as symbols: problematising the scale and pace of hominin symbolic evolution / Paul Pettitt -- Biology and mechanisms related to the dawn of language / George F.R. Ellis -- The other middle-range theories: mapping behaviour and the evolution of the mind / Benoît Dubreuil -- Metarepresentation, Homo religiosus, and Homo symbolicus / Justin L. Barrett.

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide