ABSTRACT
Life on earth is billions of years in the making, yet modern scholarship, including psychology, establishes baselines from a foreshortened view of the world and the existence of the human species. Psychology is haunted by the ghost theories that are rampant in Western culture, shadowing scholarship generally. These include biases toward literacy, abstraction, and individualism, sprinkled with negative views of prehistory, the uncivilized, and the nonliterate, despite the fact that civilized peoples show less intelligence in many ways than members of uncivilized nations. Having moved away from providing the evolved nest, adults are underdeveloped and anthropocentric, losing social and ecocentric capacities. In this stew of mistaken assumptions, psychology misunderstands the development of human nature and human potential. The divorce of human civilization from nature-as-partner has led to the decimation of other-than-human life and vast ecological disruption. Cognitive archaeology can help shift psychology away from these implicit assumptions by lengthening of view of humanity’s existence and expanding the scope of data used to draw conclusions about the nature of humanity and its potential.
