ABSTRACT
The origin of symbolic culture has both a social and a material aspect—it is concerned with the fashioning of material objects as artifacts and the development of social and cooperative living amongst human groups, necessitating new ways of understanding and communicating with each other, especially via language. By the time of Upper Paleolithic, human beings had arrived at point where they lived in a material world that was partly of their own making, in which their mental lives were distributed across a social and material Umwelt that had become integral to their survival. Whereas discursive symbols aim for precision, clarity, and singularity of meaning, in the case of dreams, myths, and works of art, the more multiple and indeterminate symbolic references, the greater and more lasting is the significance of the overall presentation. Great apes have remarkable cognitive capacities that compare very well with those of human children in areas such as perception of space, quantity, and causality.
