ABSTRACT

So far in this book, the tale being told is one based on reasonable inference and plausible interpretation. Human remains and artifacts, sometimes in the sparsest of amounts and most cryptic of form, are used to build theories of what or what was not being “thought” by Paleolithic and Neolithic humans. It has never been (and presumably never will be) possible to verify or refute theories of the actual state of the prehistoric mind for the simple reason that direct communication with those thoughts is not possible. A few grains of pollen or a small, plump figurine, therefore, produced wildly contentious debates about the cognitive processes of people who were, at the very least, vastly different culturally from us and, possibly very different cognitively. Indeed, our knowledge of the minds of even anatomically modern humans is so limited that there can be no assurance that the behavior of our predecessors, much less their cognitive processes, could be inferred from either the fragmentary remains or the grand architectural monuments they left behind. The problem, as noted earlier, is not unique to studies of cognitive antiquity; there is an enormous parallel difficulty faced by even the most modern psychological science to access mental processes on the basis of behavior. That problem is that identical behavior can be caused by a vast number of different motivations and underlying thought processes. Behaviors and artifacts, therefore, share common neutrality with regard to these underlying cognitive processes.