2. The origins of the designing brain
In the previous chapter, I examined some of the broad principles of
biological evolution, and laid the foundation of the case for considering the
ability of humans to attribute significance and meaning to the material
world as a suite of adaptations. In this chapter, the focus narrows: I will
consider the relationship of our ancestors with the organic and inorganic
environment; with each other; and, more critically for the purposes of this
study, with the things they chose to pick up and use, or pick up, modify and
use. Drawing on evidence from the disciplines of neurology, primatology and
child psychology, as well as palaeontological and archaeological data, I will
present some views as to the evolutionary origins and structure of the
human brain. Initially I do this in order to suggest that - in broad terms -
how we interact with our physical environment is, to no small degree, a
function of the brain’s evolved structure; and that, equally, that structure
is, in part, a response to that environment’s recurrent features. Then,
pausing to acknowledge a little of the significance of the so-called ‘Upper
Palaeolithic Revolution’ (or its equivalent in non-European parts of the
world), and something of the richness which the brains of modern humans
can support, I begin to explore the overwhelming importance of the social
dimensions of our existence, and the extent to which many ‘higher’ brain
functions are devoted to negotiating these.
These brain functions relating to the social dimensions of our
existence are of fundamental importance. They form the basis of my
analysis of the workings of aesthetics, insofar as they relate to artefacts in
the chapter following this one, as well as, in chapter four, the workings of
the symbolic and narrative significances and meanings which artefacts have
bestowed on them. For the remainder of the present chapter, I piece
together an account of the brain’s workings as they may relate to our
kinetic sense, and the cognitive, technical intelligence which developed
from it.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 51
2.1The workings of the brain
Our relationship with the material environment is essentially a physical
one: we experience it through our bodies, through the senses. Each body
incorporates a delicately structured nervous system, at the centre of which
is the brain. The brain (like every other aspect of our physical embodiment)
is an evolved organ – that is, its structure and operation have arisen out of
the processes of natural selection described in chapter one. There are
disagreements about the extent to which its contemporary functions remain
within this biological sphere, and these will eventually be considered, but it
is with the evolved aspects of this complex organ that we begin.
As the cognitive scientist, Michael Tomasello, reminds us: ‘Human
beings are primates. They have the same basic sense organs, the same basic
body plan, and the same basic brain plan as all other primates.’
1
 The
workings of the brain can be considered at three levels: that of reflexes,
sensations and perceptions; that of cognition, that is, the psychological
mechanisms which interpret information from this lower level (and which,
to a degree found in no other species, includes those mental systems we call
consciousness); and finally, the commissioning of behaviour that the
workings of these other mechanisms prompt.
2.2Reflexes, sensations, perceptions and cognition
In evolutionary terms, the reflex responses, sensations and
perceptions which we all (barring accident or disability) experience today,
are among the most ancient of our neural inheritances, stretching back to
ancestor organisms very unlike ourselves. Contemporary primitive animals
such as clams, for example, have their reflex ‘snap shut’ mechanisms which,
as the philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests, in terms of their responses to
the physical environment are capable only of ‘proximal anticipation’.
2
 They
are comparatively simple, and have evolved over time as economic devices
which have enabled organisms to avoid dangers, or otherwise respond in
manners which, on average, secure survival and reproduction. In humans,
some reflexes do not even call on the brain to process them, but exist as
discrete, neural wiring quite outside it.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 52
As explained and illustrated in chapter one, the make-up of any
organism reflects a history of ‘trade-offs’ where the particular combination
of characters or traits represents the configuration which – given that which
pre-exists and on which natural selection operates - most effectively
enables the organism to survive and reproduce. This is no less true of the
structures of the brains of organisms, where those mechanisms which
survive and are replicated, are just those which have (in combination with
others) proved their worth over evolutionary time. In negotiating the
physical environment, the particular configuration of brain mechanisms can
be seen as reflecting the recurrent characteristics of that environment.
Thus, following Lewontin’s observations about the nature of adaptations
cited in chapter one, the brain can be thought of as the product of our
constant interaction with our environment which, in many key aspects, has
literally been shaped by it. In speculating on the origins of functions relating
to sight, for example, Dennett reminds us that our ‘visual systems…are
exquisitely sensitive to patterns with a vertical axis of symmetry’
3
 and that
this was once a response to other (upright) organisms faced by our distant
ancestors. Plainly this and, I suggest, comparable evolved, mental responses
to shape, colour, symmetry, and pattern have consequences for our
perceptions of objects, including artefacts. It is these which will be
returned to in more detail in chapter three. For now, it is sufficient to note
that these are evolved mechanisms, arising from the recurrent features of
our physical environment, and which profoundly inform our mental
representations of it.
2.3The ‘modular’ brain
If a reflex is a comparatively simple mechanism, a sensation,
perception or an act of cognition is each progressively more complex. In
understanding how these relate to one another, it is useful to consider a
view of the brain as ‘modular’ in structure. That is, that it can be thought
of as a combination of neural mechanisms (modules), each dedicated to
addressing something of recurrent, adaptive consequence in our
environment. Because these features are recurrent, they have led to our
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 53
brains consistently delivering particular sensations and perceptions, rather
than others. These may correspond to that which is objectively there, yet
sometimes they may not, and deliver to us what may be thought of as,
variously, distorted or edited versions of objective reality.
Jerry Fodor points to the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument: a
perceptual identification often seems to rest on implications fabricated by
the brain, which go beyond anything the actual, raw data delivered to it
might support. Consider, for example, the Phi effect. Two adjacent sources
of light, each of a different colour, are turned alternately on and off at a
particular frequency, yet the brain makes us believe we see a dot move and
change colour, rather than registering what actually happens. The brain
‘fills in’ or creates the apparently missing data of the dot’s movement and
colour change. This ‘information’ must come from somewhere. Fodor
argues:
Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments do make it seem plausible that a
lot of inference [as in the example above] typically intervenes
between a proximal stimulus and a perceptual identification.
4
To support his assertion that the brain consists (partly) of dedicated,
evolved modules, geared to addressing particular recurrent environmental
features, Fodor cites the famous Müller-Lyer Illusion (fig. 8). The first line
seems longer than the second and, significantly, no amount of knowing they
are identical in length will shift this perception. Cognition is, partly, built
on perceptions, and as these two examples demonstrate, they have
sometimes evolved to be at variance with objective reality.
[What is] at issue is: How rigid is the boundary between the
information available to cognitive processes and the information
available to perceptual ones? How much of what you
know/believe/desire actually does affect the way you see? The
persistence of the illusion suggests that the answer must be: “at
most, less than all of it.”
5
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 54
In that sense, it can be argued that perception is worked by ‘encapsulated’
modules, where a module is
...an informationally encapsulated computational system – an
inference-making mechanism whose access to background
information is constrained by general features of cognitive
architecture, hence relatively rigidly and relatively permanently
constrained... It is a main thesis of Modularity [his book] that
perceptual integrations are typically performed by computational
systems that are informationally encapsulated.
6
In this way, Fodor seeks to suggest that perception resembles still
simpler reflexes in being discrete; but, unlike reflexes, perception is
inferential, and distinguished from cognition, in that the inferences are
drawn from a tightly constrained (‘encapsulated’) information database.
The adaptive advantage of this constraint on perception - it is claimed - is
that, again, somewhat like reflexes, it is rapid, unreflective, and leaves
little scope for the sorts of ambiguity which may creep in when invoking the
more wide-ranging information store used in cognition. Such self-contained,
perceptual reactions, argues Fodor, may once have been invaluable in
avoiding predators, where a reflective organism could have become a dead
one in the time it took to reflect. They persist in our make-up to this day.
In this way, our brains can be seen to embody perceptual biases,
emphasising some features at the expense of others, and even distorting
objective reality, where such distortions have delivered adaptive
advantages in the past. These biases exist because of the constant pressure
on the brain, within its limited neural capacity, effectively and usefully to
process external stimuli. As Fodor implies, the brain has neither the
capacity nor the time to absorb every piece of data about a physical
environment, process and assess each of them, in all their conceivable
combinations and then initiate appropriate behaviour. Dennett agrees:
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 55
The brain’s task is to guide the body it controls through a world of
shifting conditions and sudden surprises, so it must gather
information from that world and use it swiftly to “produce future” –
to extract anticipations in order to stay one step ahead of disaster.
7
It is useful to emphasise, at this stage, this distance between the
reality of our physical environment and our sensory and perceptual mental
representations of what it is that is out there. The latter is what we
experience and react to, and out of which we build our cognitive
understandings. It is, in that sense, a product of our evolved brains. Thus
Lewontin’s observation (cited in chapter one), regarding the extent to
which organisms are in the constant construction of their own environments,
can be seen to extend in a profound way - where humans are concerned - to
the ‘construction’ of the physical environment in which we operate, insofar
as we sense, perceive, recognise, inhabit and mentally represent it.
2.4Domain-neutral modules and ontology
I suggested in the introduction that we engage with the physical
environment at three principal levels: at the level of senses and perceptions
(including our kinetic senses); at the level of cognition, by which an
emotional spin is put on the information from these lower levels, thus
building on some senses to create our aesthetic responses, and on our
kinetic senses to deliver technical satisfaction; and, above that, at the level
of attributing symbolic or narrative meaning to it. These can be seen to
correspond to the three modes of brain activity described above, where the
attribution of significance and meaning to the material environment, as well
as the creating of artefacts to go into it, are thought of as initiated
behaviour.
The modular description of the brain offers plausible insights into its
operation at the levels of reflexes, sensations and perceptions and, to the
extent that they arise out of these, some aspects of cognition; but the
ability to attribute significance and meaning to a material environment is
often built on both aesthetic and technical responses (i.e., cognition) and -
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 56
with a complexity arguably comparable with that of language - results in the
ascribing of symbolic or narrative meaning. Just as one might ask if there is
a suite of modules to support language, so it reasonable to ask if the ability
to attribute significance and meaning to the material environment rests on a
comparable cluster of inter-related modules. The wide variety of detailed
practices in the areas of aesthetics and the ascribing of symbolic and
narrative meaning suggests, at the very least, that the results of the brain
functions may not be universal among humans, in the way that our sensory
and perceptual inputs undoubtedly are. This has consequences for our
understanding of the role of genetics in the workings of culture,
consequences which will intermittently be pursued throughout the rest of
this study.
2.5Modularity: a qualification
Part of the problem of understanding the structures of the brain and
how it operates is, as Annette Karmiloff-Smith
8
 notes, that we do so largely
by considering the behaviour which is their result. If we identify a
behaviour, such as language, tool-making  - or, indeed, by implication, the
ability to attribute significance and meaning to the material world - it is
tempting to infer a corresponding structure in the brain that enables or
facilitates it. In accounts (such as Thornhill’s
9
) which believe that the brain
is a matrix of these dedicated, sometimes called domain-specific, brain
structures, each is thought of as a ‘module’. Most of the time, and in
general terms, the past is like the future. For this type of stability, nature
confers what Dennett calls ‘hard-wired’
10
 mechanisms (modules), ‘which-
way-up-am-I?- type things’, as he puts it. For regular variations, responses
are also usually hard-wired: growing thicker fur in winter, and so on.
But sometimes the opportunities and vicissitudes in the environment
are relatively unpredictable by Mother Nature or by anyone – they
are, or are influenced by processes that are chaotic…In these cases,
no one stereotyped design will accommodate itself to all
eventualities, so better organisms [including ourselves] will be those
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 57
that can redesign themselves to some degree to meet the conditions
they encounter. Sometimes such redesign is called learning and
sometimes it is just development.
1
Dennett elects to call all these types of activity post natal design fixing. He
maintains that this is a process ‘analogous’ (and later, ‘strongly
analogous’
12
) to that of evolution by natural selection, but within the life of
the organism:
This is the first new medium of evolution: post natal design fixing in
individual brains. The candidates for selection are various brain
structures that control or influence behaviors, and the selection
process is accomplished by one or another mechanical weeding-out
process that is itself genetically installed in the nervous system.
Amazingly, this capability, itself a product of genetic evolution by
natural selection, not only gives organisms who have it an edge over
their hard-wired cousins who cannot redesign themselves, but also
reflects back on the process of genetic evolution and speeds it up.
13
This is often described as the Baldwin effect, and it is of importance
in understanding the particular manner in which our own brains have
responded to both physical and social environmental conditions.
Some organisms, including ourselves, have ‘plastic’ brains; that is,
they can be wired and re-wired in the course of their lifetimes.
Significantly, in Fodor’s model of modularity, the higher cognitive activities
are neither modular nor, in his terms, encapsulated.
14
 Yet Karmiloff-Smith
cites examples of ‘modularists’ who assert that they are.
15
 She castigates
these descriptions of the brain (espoused by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby,
for example, and – with special reference to aesthetics – Thornhill) as the
‘Swiss army knife’ model,
16
 where all or, as Fodor suggests, significant parts
of the brain are thought of as an accumulation of inherited, genetically-
controlled, dedicated modules - ‘domain-specific’, in the language of the
psychologists - physiological, neural structures. Yet the environment
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 58
(including the physical and social environment) can actually structure, that
is, physically shape the brain, during an organism’s (for which, for the
purposes of the present argument, read ‘human being’s’) lifetime.
Karmiloff-Smith asserts:
I agree that human evolution has led to increasingly complex
behaviour. However, these behaviours are not simply triggered from
genetically determined mechanisms. Rather they are the outcome of
gradual formation of internal representations during the lengthy
process of ontogenetic development [that is, as a child grows up]. It
is in the part of the brain called the neocortex (evolutionarily the
most recent part of the brain) that higher cognitive functions like
language, number and faces are processed. Rather than genetically
prespecified complex, domain-specific representations, evolution
may have generated an ever-increasing range of different learning
mechanisms in order to ensure adaptive outcomes. This would
suggest that during postnatal development the brain has a capacity to
learn and actively structure its own circuits while engaged in
processing different types of environmental input.
17
Significantly, for Karmiloff-Smith, this means that some domains or modules
may develop in response to the demands of the environment in which the
individual operates, rather than invariably being pre-programmed into the
brain because of the demands of an environment found in the long vanished
Pleistocene era (as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have argued
18
 - this is
Dawkins’ ‘time lag’ problem, alluded to in the previous chapter).
Interestingly, Thornhill will have none of it:
…environmental problems bringing about selection are specific and
not general problems. Thus, it is expected that phenotypic solutions
to environmental problems – that is, adaptations – will be special
purpose in design, because a general purpose mechanism cannot
solve a specific problem.
19
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 59
Yet such an assertion flies in the face of both Dennett’s and Karmiloff-
Smith’s emphasis on the importance of open-ended ontological learning
modules and the flexibility they argue that these confer. With regard to
ascribing significance and meaning to the material world, and the furnishing
of that world with significant and meaningful created artefacts, it is
apparent that the behaviour is a human universal, suggesting a genetic
origin and implying that it incorporates a suite of interconnected, evolved
modules; but the manifestations of the workings of this suite - if so it be - in
different cultures over time and space are, indeed, diverse, suggesting they
might well be the result of just these open-ended, non-domain-specific,
learning modules, where the brain’s wiring is configured during the
individual’s lifetime, in response to contingent, environmental stimuli
(where environment, as noted, will include both the physical and the
social). Such a view accounts more convincingly for both historical and
contemporary practices in this field of artefacts, than the suggestion by
Thornhill, that they can be explained by ever more convoluted combinations
of dedicated, domain-specific modules.
2.6 The Upper Palaeolithic ‘Revolution’: magnitude, timing, location and
speed
 I am shifting the focus of this argument away from the brain, as
such, and towards evidence from archaeology, towards artefacts, which can
be thought of as the records of some of the behaviour which the brain
initiates, with a view to understanding better how the brain came to assume
its modern configuration. I begin this part of my argument by previewing an
important turning point in human history: the Upper Palaeolithic
‘Revolution’ found in Europe, or its equivalents in other parts of the world.
There is much debate surrounding where, when and how these events
occurred, and some of that will be explored shortly. The key factor is that it
is taken to represent the emergence of modern humans with brains like our
own. I introduce this major phenomenon now, in order to give the reader an
opportunity to infer from the descriptions of events from much earlier in our
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 60
evolution, something of the eventual destination to which those events
lead.
Some have argued that the big turning point in the pre-history of
humans is the appearance of new tool types in Africa about 250,000 years
ago, but, conventionally, most have cited the apparent ‘explosion’ of
artistic, creative outputs, exemplified in the popular imagination by the
astonishing cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic Period, especially those
at Lascaux, Altamira and, discovered in 1994, the Grotte Chauvet near
Avignon.  At 30,000 years old Chauvet is twice the age of Lascaux and
Altamira, and includes 300 images of
rhinoceroses, lions, mammoths, hyenas, bears, reindeer, ibex, two
yellow horses, a red panther and an engraved owl. There was also a
centaur-like composite of human and bison, some stencils of human
hands and an abundance of red dots, many arranged in geometric
patterns or animal forms.
 20
In Marek Kohn’s judgement, ‘although its concentration of variety is
exceptional, Chauvet is characteristic of its period, in which art and
technology suddenly flourish as never before.’
21
 Conventionally, the Upper
Palaeolithic ‘Revolution’ is dated to about 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.
I have written ‘apparent’ explosion and put inverted commas around
the word ‘Revolution’ to indicate that there is considerable disagreement -
about the timing, location and speed of this development. Outside Europe,
there is steadily accumulating evidence that something very similar was
happening elsewhere in the world. As Kohn writes with justifiable
excitement about Chauvet, so Pinker, citing evidence from Australia and the
Middle East, as well as Europe, enthuses about
…unprecedented arts and technologies, which used new materials like
ivory, antler and bone, as well as stone, sometimes transported for
hundreds of miles. The toolkit included fine blades, needles, awls,
and many kinds of axes and scrapers, spear points, spear throwers,
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 61
bows and arrows, fishhooks, engravers, flutes, maybe even calendars.
They decorated everything in sight – tools, cave walls, their bodies –
and carved knick-knacks in the shapes of animals and naked women,
which archaeologists euphemistically call “fertility symbols.” They
were us.
2
Given these apparent discrepancies about timing, location and speed, I will,
refer to this change for the balance of this study as ‘the emergence of
modern humans’, although some argue that the species responsible, Homo
sapiens, may have lived several thousands of years before these dramatic
changes occurred. Later in this chapter, I will return to this matter of
timing, as it has prompted some interesting speculations as to the origins of
the modern human mind.
Indeed, I introduce this evidence now, as it certainly seems to
suggest something uncommonly close to our modern concept of design: that
is, useful artefacts which have had extra consideration given to their forms,
finishes and decoration quite over and above anything utility alone would
require – a recognisably ‘modern’ human design practice, as evidence from
the ‘bore-hole’ artefacts drawn from the past 3,500 years of human history
explored in chapter three will show. It is not unreasonable, on the basis of
the archaeological evidence, to impute modern brains, every whit as
sophisticated as our own; and to suggest that, in an extraordinary, conscious
way, quite unlike any other species on Earth, our brains can draw on
technical, kinetic skills, exercise our aesthetic sensibilities, and - as the
paintings and decoration of artefacts seem to suggest - deploy them for
social purposes.
In order to establish quite how we acquired such patterns of thought
and, more importantly, what consequences this history may have for our
contemporary engagement with artefacts, evidence and arguments relating
to much earlier phases in human and pre-human evolution now need to be
picked up.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 62
2.7Human brain size
One of the most obvious differences between our distant hominid
ancestors, modern Great Apes and ourselves is in the sheer size of our
brains, relative to the size of our bodies. Australopithecines were only some
four feet high, and their brains were about the same size as that of
chimpanzees. About 2 to 2.3 million years ago, archaic Homo species
appeared. Unlike the australopithecines, Homo habilis gradually developed
larger and larger brains. Then, through a succession of Homo species, some
half a million years ago the size of brains increased fairly rapidly for about
300,000 years.
23
 Modern humans – Homo sapiens, our own species – first
appear some 100,000 years ago, or earlier. Compared with modern
chimpanzees, our own brains are four times as large, measured as a ratio to
body size.
Large brains came at considerable ‘expense’ in evolutionary terms:
they were expensive to run: they required 22 times as much food to sustain
them as their equivalent in terms of muscle tissue at rest.
24
 To make
matters worse, these (literally) big-headed infants made childbirth difficult
- as it remains to this day, compared with the comparative nonchalance of
other primate and other mammalian births. Because of this, among human
infants, brain growth has to continue rapidly in the period immediately
following birth. This was a high-risk, high-cost, strategy: unlike the offspring
of other species, which tend to be born fully-formed, human infants are
relatively helpless, and remain more or less wholly dependent on their
parents for nurture and the provision of food for the earliest part of their
lives.
25
 Furthermore, during this period of brain growth, offspring are
especially demanding in terms of a high-quality diet. Such are the metabolic
demands of brain tissue, it has been suggested that an increase in brain size
meant that some other organ in the body had to be correspondingly
reduced, if the metabolic rate of the organism as a whole were to remain
the same, and that this organ was the gut. To process food sufficiently
efficiently to support these high energy consuming brains with a reduced gut
size may well have been one of the factors which led to the eating of high-
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 63
calorie meat. Initially this may have begun as scavenging from the carcasses
left by other carnivores, but eventually developed into hunting.
This diversity of diet may, itself have been a dividend – possibly,
even, the chief one - with different strategies open to different populations,
depending on the nature of the resources in their environment. As noted in
chapter one, specialism is accompanied by vulnerability through
inflexibility: should that environment change, such dietary ‘generalists’
would have the edge over narrower specialists, such as the plant-grinding
successors to the australopithecines, Paranthropus robustus and
Paranthropus boisei.
2.8The neocortex and social relations
The co-operation between individuals needed to rear vulnerable
offspring, the collective, organised responses needed to hunt without
getting killed – all these point to the over-arching importance of brain
growth as a means of sustaining the social. A detail of the structure of the
brains of modern humans, compared with those of primates, tends to
confirm the view that this was what this development was about. Dunbar
notes:
The neocortex is what you might call the ‘thinking’ part of the brain,
the place where conscious thought takes place. It is a rather thin
layer, being a mere five or six nerve-cells (about three millimetres)
deep.
26
Much that is distinctive about human mental activity is physically located in
the neocortex, including the processing of language. As noted, Karmiloff-
Smith proposes it as the physical location for her domain-neutral, ‘learning’
modules. Dunbar was the first to notice an apparently significant correlation
in primates between the size of the neocortex (that is, as a proportion of
total brain size) and social group size. Briefly, evidence from primates (as
well as other species, including bats) suggests a close correlation – too close
to be accidental, in the ‘tests for an adaptation’ sense - between the size of
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 64
the neocortex, and the number and quality of the relationships an individual
can sustain. Indeed, using Dunbar’s model, a group size for Homo sapiens of
approximately 150 relationships with other individuals can be predicted. He
cites evidence from modern hunter-gatherers to support this view, as well
as some examples taken from recent history. Further examples from life as
we lead it in our highly technological, complex, urban environments, with
conurbations accommodating millions, suggest that although this feature of
the brain emerged in the Pleistocene period, there is evidence to suggest
that, even in such dramatically different circumstances, in practice,
something like this upper limit continues to pertain.
27
2.9Intentionality and artefacts
It is often argued that one of the key differences between non-human
primate brains and human brains (or, indeed, between infant humans in
their early development, and the child and adult thereafter) is the high
number of levels of intentionality which human brains can accommodate.
Most animals with brains know that they are hungry, or believe that they are
in danger; that is the first level of intentionality. If an individual can
imagine that others, like themselves, have minds, and speculate on what
that other may be thinking, that is the second order (sometimes called
having a ‘theory of mind’). Speculating on what another may be thinking
that a third thinks is the third order, and so on. Dunbar suggests an absolute
upper limit for humans of six orders of intentionality, but maintains that in
practice, we habitually use second and third orders, are capable of fourth
and fifth, but find sixth fantastically difficult.
28
As evidence from Franz de Waal’s
29
 classic study concerning the
chimpanzees of the Burger’s Zoo, Arnhem, testifies, non-human primates
can lead complex, indeed dramatic social lives, with alliances, rivalries,
deceptions, battles, and appeasement. Such social complexity among non-
human primates is described by some as ‘Machiavellian intelligence’,
30
 that
is, behaviour whereby the individual seeks to extract every last personal
advantage out of each social interaction. Maynard–Smith and Szathmáry go
as far as to suggest:
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 65
…selection for social intelligence was a major cause of the increase in
brain size in monkeys, apes and humans, and…a theory of mind was
already present in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans
some 5 [or 6] million years ago.
31
Nonetheless, it can be said with confidence that non-human primates
are less adept at these orders of intentionality than we are, and that this
has many consequences for them. Interestingly, evidence from Tomasello
suggests that some of these consequences are to do with the uses to which
objects are put. As he indicates, in their natural environment, non-human
primates:
 do not point or gesture to outside objects for others;
 do not hold objects up to show them to others;
 do not try to bring others to locations so that they can observe things
there;
 do not actively offer objects to other individuals by holding them out;
 do not intentionally teach other individuals new behaviours.
32
Monkeys, it is thought, do not have a theory of mind; chimpanzees,
however, do; while we humans, with our many levels of intention, outdo
them both. Thus, while non-human primates may lead social lives of greater
or lesser degrees of complexity, they do not, as we humans routinely do,
use objects to articulate those relationships. From the perspective of the
present study, the last point on Tomasello’s list is also significant, to the
extent that it relates, firstly, to the transmission of anything which, by
human standards, we might describe as culture (insofar as it is intentionally
transmitted), and secondly - and as a consequence of this – to the
instruction in the making and using of artefacts.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 66
2.10Human brains are social brains
As noted, we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees six million
years ago; our genetic make-up places us closer to chimpanzees (98.5%
3
),
than either of us is to the gorilla.
34
 The greatest difference between us and
chimpanzees in terms of behaviour is human culture and its many
expressions, of which the creation of our own contributions to the physical
environment (the subject of this study) is a major part. Such behaviour is
made possible, mainly, because that 1.5% genetic difference has led to us
having, by primate standards, much larger, and differently organised brains.
Nicholas Humphry suggested in 1976 that ‘the higher intellectual faculties of
primates have evolved as an adaptation to the complexities of social life’
and that our ‘styles of thinking which are primarily suited to social problem
solving colour the behaviour of man and other primates even towards the
inanimate world.’ 
35
 [emphases added]. Mithen, echoing Humphry’s line of
argument, suggests that even human consciousness itself (that is, reflexive
consciousness) originally evolved ‘as a cognitive trick to allow an individual
to predict the social behaviour of other members of his or her group…In
other words, consciousness evolved as part of social intelligence.’.
36
I do not intend aligning my argument to any one particular account of
how modern humans came to emerge. I will, however, suggest on the basis
of the arguments cited above, that in principle, Humphry’s assertions are
correct, inescapable and critical: that we are but an extreme example of a
cluster of socially organised species (primates); that our more complex
thinking (and, by implication, behaviour) is geared towards furthering goals
of social organisation; and that, inevitably, as a consequence, how we
engage with the material environment - and again, by implication, how we
engage with artefacts - are both products of this intensely social
evolutionary history.
2.11Kinetic sense and technical pleasure
Our brains eventually supported the dazzling products of the Upper
Palaeolithic, and its equivalents (and possibly, antecedents) elsewhere.
Before considering what circumstances - especially in relation to the
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 67
changes in the structure of the brain - may have led to this immensely
significant event in human history, I will sketch in something of the possible
origins of designing – an activity (in its fullest sense) at the heart of that
major change, and central to the pursuit of fully human life ever since.
Contemporary common experience confirms that there are pleasures
attached to identifying a thing which can be used (especially if that use is
novel); there can be pleasure in modifying a thing, such that it can
efficiently be used; and there can be pleasure in using a thing that is
effective. We might think of these as ‘technical’ pleasures arising from our
‘kinetic sense’, by which I mean our senses both of inhabiting and moving in
our own bodies, and of our interactions through those bodies with physical
things. (I will set to one side the other major cognitive pleasure derived
from our engagement with the material environment – aesthetic pleasure -
until the next chapter; aesthetics are of such importance that they warrant
a much fuller exploration than the one offered here with regard to the
kinetic, technical pleasures of designing.)
The account which follows does not locate particular evolutionary
events at particular times, but merely extends the commonly acknowledged
principle that, while their contingent triggers may be almost infinitely
varied, in broad terms, our emotions – a vital dimension of cognition – are
evolved in origin. As E. O. Wilson wrote:
The biologist who is concerned with questions of physiology and
evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and
shaped by the emotional control centres in the hypothalamus and the
limbic system at the centre of the brain. These centres flood our
consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and
others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit
the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask,
made the hypothalamus and the limbic system? They evolved by
natural selection.
37
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 68
Among those ‘others’ is pleasure, and the emotion of pleasure is often
adaptive. So, for example, eating and sex feel good. They are pleasures
evolved in order to encourage us to engage in both, and thus enhance our
chances of survival, and of reproducing respectively (and of passing on our
genes). Ehrlich reminds us of the ‘purposes’ of emotions, and their
importance in securing our evolutionary survival:
In human beings...emotions play many roles (for example, informing
other people of our moods, motives and intentions),...but a
particularly important role for them is to coordinate and assign
priorities to...brain programs [modules]...Emotions can be thought of
as subjectively experienced conscious states of awareness that are
focussed primarily on the perceived goodness or badness of some
thing...
38
The cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker, remarks:
…nothing in culture makes sense except in the light of psychology.
Evolution created psychology, and that is how it explains culture. The
most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.’
39
Therefore, by inference, at least, the modern pleasures attached to – in its
simplest forms – the kinetic, technical aspects of design are both
evolutionary and adaptive in origin.
2.12‘Thing using’ and cognition
The historian of engineering, F. T. Evans, has suggested
40
 that the
first step in the emergence of designing must have been - as with
chimpanzees - the ability to recognise that a found object (a stick for
extracting grubs, or a stone to crack nuts) had a special, utilitarian
potential which marked it out from other naturally occurring objects. This
refinement of an individual’s ability deliberately to discriminate, if
advantageous in the securing of resources, would, on average, deliver an
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 69
adaptive edge - be it ever so marginal - and thus, over time, become part of
a virtuous cycle in natural selection. Evans suggests such ‘thing using’
stretches back beyond the two million years or so for which there are
archaeological records of stone tools, perhaps as far back as the point, some
six million
41
 years ago, when the hominid line split off from that of the
ancestors of the chimpanzees.
If there were stone tools two million years ago, then we can infer
that there were other tools for a long time before that…we should
leave our minds open to the important possibility that things were
being used…
42
Chimpanzees plainly display emotions when confronted with or
denied food. The sociobiologist Andras  Ludmany
43
 maintains that we store
our experiences as specific information patterns (which he calls IPs) in the
brain. As each new experience presents itself, we try to match it with our
store of IPs, rather than creating a new IP from scratch, every time the
unfamiliar heaves into view. Recognition delivers satisfaction and
satisfaction gives pleasure. Cumulatively, these can become complex, but
individually, they need not be.
4
 Ludmany mounts this argument as an
evolutionary explanation for aesthetic sensibilities; I propose it extends - by
implication - the ‘I see/hear/feel/smell/taste food’ satisfaction to include a
similar, positive feeling when identifying those things – objects with ‘tool
potential’ - which might help secure food.
Conventionally, we tend to think of designing as necessarily including
the conceiving of and making of a thing. Yet I suggest the earliest stage in
the evolution of designing may not have involved the fashioning of an
artefact much, if at all, but instead, the exercise of a critical faculty, an
adaptive, advantageous act of discrimination, reinforced by an emotional
satisfaction.
In Evans’ view the dividends of such foraging for ‘found tools’ for our
hominid ancestors may have been considerable:
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 70
Plain pebbles can crack nuts and seashells, or can be thrown as
missiles. A dead animal offered, apart from its meat: shoulder blades
to dig with; a bladder to carry water; hard, pointed horns; gut; a
jawbone studded with teeth…and so on. Above all, it is necessary to
imagine what power there was in a stick. It can scrape and dig,
revealing new food sources like roots and bulbs; for primates have
nails not claws, so they are poorly fitted for digging. The stick can
extend the reach and knock down fruit and nuts. As a club it is an
energy storing weapon – other animals can only store energy by
charging at high speed…And lastly, it might have made walking easier
for a learner biped just as it does for an ageing one.
45
Thing using may itself have been satisfying. Mithen, the
archaeologist, is persuaded of young children’s possession of a dedicated
‘intuitive physics’ module;
46
 while on the basis, partly, of his own direct
observations of very young children, Pinker, the child psychologist, is wholly
persuaded of the innate nature of our technical intelligence:
Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved,
our tools made us. One-year old babies are fascinated by what
objects can do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for
pushing, cloth and strings for pulling, and supports for holding things
up…around eighteen months, children show an understanding that
tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and
shape are more important than its color and ornamentation.
47
Mithen and Pinker’s views would tend to confirm Evans’ suggestion
that technical, ‘kinetic’ intelligence is innate and the result of a long,
evolutionary history. I suggest too, that the pleasures it delivers are
evolved.
Pinker’s remark about colour and ornamentation is suggestive. Could
it be that however important aesthetic judgements have become to us, such
an appreciation is only a characteristic of later development? Put simply,
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 71
did aesthetic sensibilities evolve more recently than technical ones? In
chapters three and five I will argue that – in terms of their workings among
modern humans – there is evidence that this may, indeed, be so.
2.13Tool-making and cognitive advances
Whatever their lost or unidentified (and probably unidentifiable)
antecedents, the earliest archaeological evidence of tools is the modified
stones and pebbles and flint flakes ( so-called ‘Oldowan’ tools), the oldest
dating from 2.5 million years ago in Ethiopia (fig. 9). Although these had no
consistent form, Mithen suggests they mark an incremental advance in
cognitive skills:
First, although the function of the Oldowan tools remains unclear,
there is little doubt that some were made to make other tools – such
as the production of a stone flake to sharpen a stick…The making of
one tool to make another tool is unknown among chimpanzees. It
involves holding in one’s mind the qualities of two contrasting types
of raw material, such as stone and wood, and an understanding of
how one can impinge on the other. [Secondly] To detach the type of
flakes one finds at sites in the Oduvai Gorge, one needs to recognize
acute angles on the nodules, to select so-called striking platforms and
to employ good hand-eye co-ordination to strike the nodule in the
correct place, in the right direction and with the appropriate amount
of force. Members of H. habilis were working stone nodules in a
fundamentally different manner from the way chimpanzees work raw
materials.
48
The successors to the Oldowan tools, Acheulian handaxes (figs.10, 11
and 12), which first appeared, according to Stephen Mithen, 1.4 million
years ago,
49
 marked further cognitive advances. Kohn suggests that unlike
...the hominids who chipped out the Oldowan tools, the makers of
these artefacts seem to have had an idea in their heads of the shape
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 72
they wanted to produce. They seem to have envisaged a form and
imposed it on their material.
50
…which is recognisably a key mental aspect of design in its modern
configuration. Indeed, it should be noted that while artefacts which seem to
testify to brains like our own have been made for – at most – some 70,000 or
100,000 years, our ancestors created these handaxes for more than a million
years. It would seem unlikely that such practices sustained over such a vast
time span should not leave traces of some sort in our contemporary
relationships with the things we make.
2.14Handaxes as tools
There has been much speculation as to the uses to which these
handaxes were put.
51
 There is evidence they were well-designed as tools.
Some argue they were part of moves towards exploiting more effectively an
environment in which plant-rich forest was gradually giving way to
increasingly large savannah grasslands. Overall, food resources were
becoming less plentiful, and (apart from the reasons already cited above) a
diet supplemented by meat made sense. Glynn Isaac, an archaeologist and
modern ‘knapper’ who conducted numerous practical experiments,
concluded they could have been used in ‘butchery, hacking sticks or clubs
from branches, sharpening sticks, opening up beehives, digging into logs to
get larvae, peeling off bark and shredding pith.’
52
 Kohn tells of an Oxford
research student who persuaded a butcher to dismantle a deer carcass with
an Acheulian axe:
This exercise, demonstrating that it is possible to cut up an animal of
medium size without having to grip the axe tightly, raises the
possibility that the continuous edge might be an attractive design
from an economic point of view. The greater the length of the sharp
edge on a handaxe, the longer the tool could be used before being
discarded.
53
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 73
Peter Jones concluded that the almond shape arose as a compromise
between efficiency, weight and strength. Overall, he judged it ‘a well-
designed tool aimed at the problem of living and travelling through material
scarce areas’.
54
 Plainly, in terms of technical, kinetic intelligence, the
makers of these handaxes were doing well.
2.15Handaxes: aesthetic appraisal and social significance?
 Isaac had noted that the simplest of handaxes could probably have
achieved all of the tasks he proposed as efficiently as the more refined,
elegant ones. ‘Why’ ask Kohn and Mithen,
was time invested in making these artefacts when less extensively
retouched artefacts, or even plain unretouched flakes, are suitable
for tasks  such as butchery, woodworking and other activities for
which handaxes were used?
5
The material – flint – was not easy to work in the first place. Evans, the
engineering historian, whom one senses has had his own personal experience
of it, calls flint ‘the most bloody-minded and fractious of materials in
creation’.
56
 Further, Kohn, in his sustained meditation on Acheulian axes, As
We Know It, observes, ‘It is questionable whether the improvements in
efficiency offered by [the more sophisticated, worked] handaxes were great
enough to repay the extra effort required to make them.’
57
Somehow, these extra ‘costs’ (in terms of time and effort) must have
been justified. There are clues pointing to the strong possibility that these
artefacts may have had significances to our hominid ancestors only
tangentially linked to their usefulness: firstly, even to modern Homo sapiens
many of them are beautiful, and it is a beauty which depends partly on their
shape, their symmetry in several directions, and often on their regularity,
which as noted, may often have been a superfluous detail, in terms of
function. I am not suggesting that Homo habilis or Homo heidelbergiensis
had an aesthetic sensibility in quite the same terms as modern humans; but
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 74
it is not unreasonable to infer a preference, at least, for – and pleasure at -
these ‘non-useful’ characteristics, which (as pursued in the chapter
following) may eventually have formed the basis of some of our own
predispositions, with regard to these matters.
Secondly - and puzzlingly - archaeological finds include sites where
many of them seem to have been discarded unused, or after very little use.
Thirdly, they often appear at individual sites in great numbers; and lastly,
there are some examples of handaxes which could not easily be used at all,
because of their great size, such as those found at Furze Platt and Shrub Hill
in southern England (fig. 11). There are even examples where it appears as
if a decision has been taken deliberately to allow a fossil embedded in the
rock to remain there – something which to a modern eye, looks suspiciously
like a decorative, ‘artistic’ decision.
Kohn and Mithen (and more recently in 2003, Mithen alone
58
) argue
that these apparent anomalies can only be fully understood, once the
handaxes are considered – in a manner directly akin to the tail of the
peacock or the antlers of male deer – as tokens of sexual fitness, following
what is known as the Handicap Principle. As Geoffrey Miller has proposed
that the mechanism of which the Handicap Principle is an element - sexual
selection – serves to explain the origins of all human culture, including
aesthetics and much else besides which is the subject of this study; and as
in chapter five I refute that stance, I will take a little time to explain it
here.
2.16The Handicap Principle
Miller writes:
Darwin understood that in most sexually-reproducing species, there
would be strong incentives for choosing one’s sexual mate carefully,
because one’s offspring would inherit their traits, good or bad, along
with one’s own traits.  Bad mate preferences would find themselves
in poor-quality offspring, and would eventually die out.
59
 
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 75
As explained in chapter one, in evolution, for any trait to be
sustained by natural selection (that is, persistently to figure in succeeding
generations’ genetic make-up), it must deliver some advantage to the
organism in terms of either survival or reproduction, or both. In other
words, it must be efficient. Darwin had noticed that some traits – the
fantastic tails of peacocks, the elaborate nests of bower birds - seemed to
make little sense in terms of their contribution to survival. Famously, the
peacock, by supporting so impractical an ornament, not only impairs its
owner’s ability to escape predators, but also, as with the bower bird,
requires that time and energy be diverted towards the maintenance of its
ornament (incur ‘costs’, in other words), which might otherwise be devoted
more directly to the securing of resources. These, and other similar traits
(on average, displayed more by the males of species, rather than by
females) do make sense, however, if considered as adjuncts to courtship.
The elaborate tail, the ornamented nest, and much else (including, among
hominids, Mithen and Kohn argue, the Acheulian handaxe), are reliable
indicators to potential mates of genetic fitness, that is of the strength,
health, intelligence or other valuable characteristics of the bearer.
Survival itself only proves an ability to secure sufficient resources to
survive. Bearers of these tokens of sexual fitness, by contrast, prove they
are ‘fit’ enough to secure surpluses – an attractive prospect to a potential
mate, who may bear the chief responsibility for rearing such offspring as
may arise from any union. The costs expended on these otherwise seemingly
inefficient adjuncts guarantee to the potential mate that the indication is
authentic and reliable. After all, if it could easily be faked, its value as such
a signal would disappear. As Miller puts it: ‘Utility rules under “utilitarian
selection”, but waste can rule under “signal selection”.
60
 Design
theoreticians should note how this, a biological theory of the past two
decades or so, is vividly and uncannily accurately pre-figured in Thorstein
Veblen’s theory of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in his cultural classic, The
Theory of the Leisure Class, originally published in 1899.
61
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 76
2.17The handaxe as genetic fitness indicator
The peacock has no choice but to sport its tail; the hominid,
however, could choose whether or not to make a handaxe, and also what
kind and quality of axe to make. Kohn and Mithen suggest this is a process
known as ‘strategic choice’,
62
 in which the male - and it is predominantly
males, in this scenario
63
 - elects to create more or less costly artefacts,
depending on the circumstances in which he finds himself (time needed to
secure resources for survival, present dangers, his own abilities, etc.). The
handaxe would have to be created in the presence of the desired mate to
guarantee that the courting individual had not just picked it up. In such
circumstances, it could, according to Mithen, reliably demonstrate  a
number of potentially attractive qualities: an ability to identify sources of
the high quality raw material needed to make the axe, and by implication a
good knowledge of resources in the environment in general: ‘The ability to
comprehend and exploit the environment in this way would be attractive in
a mate, as an indication of heritable perceptual and cognitive skills.’
64
; the
ability to form and execute plans, to respond and rethink as each flake was
detached, to display, in fact ‘persistence and determination’
65
; ‘health,
strength, good eyesight and coordination, whereas poor knapping might
indicate the opposite’
6
; social skills, to the extent that the knapper had to
bear the handicap of producing the handaxe and still survive and prosper in
social groups; and finally – in an argument which will be picked up in
chapter three - it is suggested that, as Miller avers, the symmetry of the
handaxes may have ‘play[ed] on the perceptual biases of receivers to
attract attention, provoke excitement, and increase willingness to mate’.
67
Mithen proposes two possible origins for this bias towards symmetry:
sensitivity to symmetry has been taken by Dennett, among others, to have
arisen in the deep evolutionary past from a sensitivity to the symmetry of
other animals. In recognising it, the organism would effectively detect a
potential predator, prey or sexual partner. The other explanation is that
symmetry is often a reliable signal of healthy genes in many organisms – an
‘honest advertisement’, in the jargon.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 77
Once both the behaviour (or more properly, perhaps, the
‘performance’) and its tangible outcome had succeeded (or failed –
archaeological sites include countless very roughly formed, apparently
carelessly or badly formed examples) to attract the attention of the
prospective mate in the desired way, the handaxe could be discarded. It
could only be seen to be made from scratch once. As a fitness indicator, at
least, it was now useless.
After more than a million years of more or less unchanging
production, the makers of these tools are joined by new, archaic Homo
sapiens. From about 200,000 years ago onwards (usually referred to as the
Middle Palaeolithic Period), new types of stone tools appear, and specialist
tools for particular tasks gradually supplant the generalist handaxe. The last
handaxes of this pattern were being produced in a limited way only some
50,000 years ago;
68
 the function of the handaxe in sexual selection, it
seems, had gradually slipped from practice, to be replaced by other
behaviours. With bigger brains, and more slowly maturing infants, Kohn and
Mithen argue, foraging techniques may have changed. Females alone could
perhaps no longer secure sufficient resources on their own, and may now
have needed a more practical, useful mate. According to Mithen, although
many of these new tools of the Middle Palaeolithic were often finely made,
none of them were carved or decorated.
69
2.18The timing of the emergence of modern human brains
I am endeavouring to explain something of the relationship which we,
Homo sapiens, have with artefacts. To that extent, I am interested in how
our brains became recognisably ‘modern’. As noted, conventionally, the
dramatic evidence of the Upper Palaeolithic Period has often been taken to
indicate not only the existence of the modern human brain, but also its
emergence. The conventional dating of this deeply significant turning point
has been given as between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Yet it is argued
modern Homo sapiens first appeared about 100,000 years ago, or earlier
with - after a few false starts - a gradual spread out of Africa to other parts
of the world. If the conventional timing is accepted, and these Homo
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 78
sapiens possessed brains substantially identical to our own, why this
apparent 50,000 year delay?
I have suggested that there is a question mark over this timing: both
Pinker
70
 and Oppenheimer, among others, have recently tended towards the
view that earlier dates for this development are viable. Pointing to the
Euro-centricity of the conventional view (at the expense of data from other
parts of the world), as well as the slender chances of tangible evidence
surviving at all, they favour 70,000 or even 100,000 years as a more likely
proposition for the emergence of Homo sapiens with ‘modern’ brains, and
something akin to modern sensibilities, and in a fundamental, rather than a
contingent sense, modern culture. As an un-named archaeologist complains
on the Blombos Cave Project website (an excavation in the southern Cape in
South Africa):
Modern human behaviour developed in Africa at a much earlier stage
[than evidence from Europe would suggest], and this development is
linked to anatomical modernity - a gradual process that perhaps
started more than 200,000 years ago but certainly long before the
start of the European Upper Palaeolithic. Most ‘late origin’ models
draw heavily on the European Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition
(about 40,000 years ago) for their construction, but applying
eurocentric evidence for ‘modern behaviour’ to an African context
has drawn considerable criticism. Until recently archaeological
evidence for modern human behaviour in Africa has been limited and,
consequently, the model for a late European linked development of
‘modern behaviour’ is widely accepted. Unfortunately only a small
number of archaeological sites that date to this time range have been
well excavated in Africa and evidence supporting an early African
origin has been limited – in comparison there are many hundreds of
well excavated European sites demonstrating a florescence of modern
behaviour traits from about 40,000 years ago.
71
Oppenheimer broadly concurs:
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 79
It is absurd to suggest that they [in Australia] and the rest of the
world had to learn their own speech and paintings from Europeans
[where conventionally, the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution is said –
exclusively – to have occurred]. There is every reason and much
evidence…to suppose that their common African ancestor had already
mastered the skills of speech, art and symbolic representation long
before leaving Africa 80,000 years ago.
72
To propose some fantastically rapid, cultural transmission, to explain the
near contemporaneousness of some finds dotted about the world, whereby
Australian and African peoples ‘learned’ culture from Europeans also strikes
Oppenheimer as equally fallacious:
The simplest answer, which does away with this paradox and similar
ones, is that the African ancestors of all non-Africans came out of
Africa painting, talking, singing, and dancing – and fully modern!
73
2.19The origin of the modern mind?
An alternative proposition for the delay – if delay there was - is made
by both Pinker, and in some detail, by Mithen. Pinker suggests that the
administrative convenience of believing fossil remains to be those of Homo
sapiens tends to underplay the extent to which the species may have
evolved, or successive, minor subspecies been a part of the process. As the
earliest specimens have low brows, and differ somewhat from anatomically
modern Homo sapiens, then why not, asks Pinker, allow that brains may
have developed too?
74
In The Prehistory of the Mind,
75
 Mithen takes this idea further. He
argues that, in the hominid brain, it is reasonable to infer that three major
modules or intelligences evolved (of which all other ‘smaller’ modules are
subsets) in response to recurrent tasks hominids faced in their adaptive
environment: social intelligence as noted, a commonplace among primates;
technical intelligence, that is, skills and pleasures building on kinetic sense;
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 80
and natural history intelligence or the ability more effectively to
discriminate among plants and animals which might be the more beneficial
from the point of view of securing resources, or avoiding danger. According
to Mithen, during this period of apparent stasis (which he describes as
‘rather dull’,
76
) these three modules may have increased in efficiency, but,
critically, operated largely in isolation from one another.
We have been considering the possible uses and significances of stone
tools in advance of the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. If Mithen’s
proposition is true, then this has consequences for the argument mounted
here: the ability to identify found objects in the natural environment as
having technical ‘tool potential’ may – as with modern chimpanzees - have
been severely limited for a long time; and the social consequences of
technical tool-making, ownership or use, similarly undeveloped. Thus – as
with children with autism today – technical abilities might be developed to
quite high levels, without them necessarily impinging on the quality of
social interaction.
The significance hominids may have attached to Acheulian axes –
created while these modules remained isolated, by this account - only
corresponds in part to how modern human minds engage with artefacts: the
reflexive and sensory levels of engagement were almost certainly there, as
well as most perceptual aspects; who can say whether technical pleasure
was present or not but, also at the cognitive level, the consistent forms and
finishes of the axes seem a reasonable body of evidence from which to infer
the beginnings of some aesthetic preferences (the basis of which I will
shortly explain in the following chapter). But, in terms of their meaning,
nothing – in Kohn and Mithen’s account, at least – suggests the handaxes
were operating at anything other than the cognitive level of signals; that is,
that as genetic fitness indicators, they referred narrowly to a present state,
and not, as is habitually done in modern human material culture, as
symbols, referring to things or states absent (or, by extension, as symbolic
elements in narratives).
According to Mithen’s hypothesis, the ‘walls’ in the hominid mind
between the social, technical, and natural history modules only dissolve
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 81
once symbolic thought - and with it the grammar (structures) of language -
evolved, such that intelligence from one module might easily inform
intelligence in another, in the manner we recognise in our modern selves.
Mithen suggests that:
…language switched from a social to a general-purpose function,
consciousness as a means to predict other individuals’ behaviour to
managing a mental database of information relating to all domains of
behaviour. A cognitive fluidity arose within the mind, reflecting new
connections, rather than new processing power. And consequently,
this transformation occurred with no increase in brain size. It was, in
essence, the origins of the symbolic capacity that is unique to the
human mind…
7
Only with the appearance of this ‘cognitive fluidity’ can the technical
possibilities of the natural environment’s resources be fully recognised; only
then can symbolic social significance be attached to that natural
environment; and - as the evidence of the Upper Palaeolithic period, no less
than that from Africa, Australia and elsewhere in the world - seems mutely
to testify, only then can symbolic social significance be ascribed to the
artefacts, created by applying technical intelligence to materials found in
the natural environment. In short, only then can the modern mind both
generate – and interact with - the full richness of human culture.
Conclusion
Mithen’s is an attractive and persuasive account. But, for the
purposes of the present argument, it is not essential that what Maynard-
Smith and Szathmáry call his ‘speculative’
78
 proposition is precisely accurate
or not. So, for example, the sequence he describes may be sound, but the
timing awry. It could be, as noted, that further non-European,
archaeological evidence predating that presently associated with the Upper
Palaeolithic ‘Revolution’ has yet to come to light, supporting still further
the idea that the modern human mind existed anything up to 50,000 years
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 82
or more earlier than Mithen and others often suggest; and that the change
was, indeed, more gradual, than the attractive, headline-grabbing
‘Revolution’ of hitherto conventional accounts implies. Or again, it might be
that the modern human mind existed earlier, but left behind few, if any,
tangible, non-compostable traces. Yet another view could be that through
repeated exposure, the recurrent ‘truths’ about the character of the natural
environment and the mechanical behaviour of materials would eventually be
apprehended by a brain with a steadily improving general intelligence,
rather than with domain-specific intelligences – although I suggest that on
the basis of such consensus as there is about the workings of the brain cited
above, this last is unlikely.
The critical points are these: there is a strong, persuasive body of
expert opinion which points to the over-arching significance of the social in
driving human evolution, as hominids competed with other species for
resources in unstable, and sometimes difficult circumstances. If the absence
of remains
79
 and the example of the limited abilities of modern non-human
primates is allowed as evidence,
80
 then it seems likely that, after the split
from the common ancestor six million years ago, our most distant
antecedents had but the rudiments of technical intelligence. Thereafter,
archaeological evidence suggests that simple stone tools and then handaxes
with distinctive formal qualities became commonplace. A credible account
of the possible significance of handaxes as genetic fitness indicators (that is,
an explicitly social role) has been proposed. Handaxes can further be
regarded as evidence of limited advances in technical and cognitive
competences, as well as, perhaps, the beginnings of what (if they may be
termed such) might be considered as their aesthetic preferences. It is these
which will be pursued in the next chapter.
Things seem to remain eerily static for more than a million years,
suggesting that during this period, hominids developed very little, if at all.
In the Middle Palaeolithic Period, something happened – a change in
climate, a neural breakthrough, a crisis in resources, something else yet to
be identified, or any combination of these – which precipitated a somewhat
more varied approach to the design of stone tools, and to tools made of
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 83
other materials; this suggests further ‘progress’ in terms of  cognitive
‘designing’ skills, especially in relation to technical intelligence; but at this
stage, they were devoid of decoration. Indeed, there is no evidence of ‘art’
at all, suggesting that the modern human mind was not yet fully formed. I
favour the view (as proposed by Mithen, above) that at some point
consciousness, and - with a critical importance that no one disputes -
symbolic thought and language, both arose in response to the demands of
larger, and therefore, by definition, more complex social relationships.
However, once again, the argument mounted here stands if other
reasons are found: it is chiefly important that they have evolved, and that
they continue to play central roles in how we feel, think and behave, and
that, whatever their origins, they play major roles in mediating our social
relationships. Indeed, at some point (sooner or later) after the first
appearance of Homo sapiens 100,000 years or more ago, there is evidence
that the fully modern mind had, indeed, taken shape. Paintings, sculptures,
decorated artefacts, personal decoration, technically ingenious and diverse
types of tools all point unambiguously to the fact that people walked the
Earth with senses, emotions and behaviours comparable to the ones found
(albeit with a bewildering variety of contingent cultural content) in
ourselves.
The key principle is this: we are evolved creatures. In evolution
(apart from a regular peppering of non-purposive,
81
 and usually minor
‘accidents’), in all major respects, our physiological, neural and mental
make-ups are profoundly informed by this history, and its guiding principle
of adaptation: nothing is for nothing. Throughout this study, I have
emphasised the three levels at which we engage with artefacts: at the level
of the reflexes, senses and perceptions; at the level of cognition, by which I
mean, principally, technical and aesthetic pleasures; and at the level of
symbol and narrative. Following the principle just outlined, I will use the
next chapter to develop some ideas about the origins of the first two of
these. This will form the foundation for the first half of the model proposed
in chapter five.
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 84
Yet no credible account of human evolution would fail to attach
importance to the human capacity for symbolic thought, language and
narrative (even if its significance were quite other than that suggested by
Mithen). Accordingly, I will turn my attention to these in the whole of
chapter four. These are the arguments which will underpin the second half
of the model subsequently developed in chapter five.
                                        
1
 Tomasello, M., The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Harvard
University Press, Harvard, 2001 (orig. 1999), p. 15
2
 Dennett, D. C., Consciousness Explained, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press,
London, 1993 (orig.1991), p. 178
3
 Dennett, p. 180
4
 Fodor, J. A., ‘Précis of The Modularity of the Mind’ Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 8, 1985, p. 494
5
 Fodor, p. 495
6
 Fodor, p. 496
7
 Dennett, p. 144
8
 Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Why Babies’ Brains Are Not Swiss Army Knives:
Evolutionary Psychology and Nativism: A Marriage Made in Heaven?’ in Rose,
H. and Rose, S. (eds.), Alas, Poor Darwin, Jonathan Cape, London, 2000, pp.
144-145
9
 Thornhill, R., ‘Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics’, in
Voland, E., and Grammer, K., (eds.) Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer,
Heidelberg, 2003, pp. 17-18
10
 Dennett, p. 182
1
 Dennett, p. 183
12
 Dennett, p. 184
13
 Dennett, p. 184
14
 Fodor, p. 496
15
 Karmiloff-Smith, p. 144
16
 Steven Mithen recalls attending a lecture by Leda Cosmides in the mid
1990s, where she actually held up a Swiss army knife ‘declaring it to be the
mind’. Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art
and Science, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999 (orig. 1996), p. 42
17
 Karmiloff-Smith, p. 144
18
 Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture’, in
Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary
Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1995 (orig. 1992), pp. 19-136
19
 Thornhill, p. 17
20
 Kohn, M., As We Know It, Granta Books, London, 1999 p. 173
21
 Kohn, p. 173
2
 Pinker, S., How the Mind Works, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, (The
Softback Preview), London, 1998, p. 202
23
 Dunbar, R., The Human Story: A new history of mankind’s evolution,
Faber & Faber, London, 2004, pp. 26-29. Ironically, the largest brains were
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 85
                                                                                                                    
inside the skulls of the Neanderthals, who, it has been suggested, the
slightly smaller-brained Homo sapiens may have brought to extinction.
24
 Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, p. 11
25
 I have not read this anywhere as a specific suggestion, but it occurs to me
that this evolved capacity of human infants to learn if they are to survive
might have been a turning point in the development of specifically human
culture; that is, that this infant capacity rapidly to learn may have begun as
a by-product of a species evolving to support a larger brain (or a larger neo-
cortex, as explained later) which could service the management of larger,
more complex social groups;  but that this ability, even if less pronounced in
adult life, did, nonetheless, eventually spill over into adulthood, thus
enabling human evolution through culture, as well as through biology.
26
 Dunbar, R., Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Faber &
Faber, London, 1996, p. 62
27
 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, pp. 61-78
28
 
28
 Dunbar, R., The Human Story: A new history of mankind’s evolution,
pp. 45-52
29
 de Waal, F., Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among the Apes,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
30
 This was the title of an influential collection of essays: Bryne, R. W., and
Whiten, A., (eds.) Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the
Evolution of the Intellect in Monkeys, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988
31
 Maynard Smith, J., and Szathmáry, E., The Origins of Life: From the Birth
of Life to the Origins of Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. p.
143
32
 Tomasello, p. 21
3
 Dunbar, The Human Story, p. 21; Tomasello, p. 2, suggests 99%
34
 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 69
35
 Humphry, N. K., ‘ The social function of the intellect’ in Bateson, P. P.
G., and Hinde, R. A., (eds.) Growing Points in Ethology, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 316; reproduced in Byrne and Whiten.
36
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind, p.147
37
 Wilson, E. O., Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition. The Belknap Press of
the Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998 (orig. 1975), p. 3
38
 Ehrlich, P. R., Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect,
Island Press, Washington, 2000, p. 121
39
 Pinker, p. 210
40
 Evans, F. T., ‘Two Legs, Thing Using and Talking: The Origins of the
Creative Engineering Mind’, AI & Society, vol.12, 1998 pp. 185 - 213
41
 Evans actually writes ‘five to eight million’ years ago, but authorities
seem now to be settling on six million years as credible.
42
 Evans, p. 192
43
 At least, that is how he styled himself when he presented his paper at the
annual conference of the European Sociobiological Society at the Free
University of Amsterdam in 1993, on which the article cited here was based.
I do not know how many still describe themselves as ‘sociobiologists’, now
that the more neutral ‘evolutionary psychology’ tag has been developed.
Ludmany, A., ‘The Adaptive Role of the Aesthetic Experience: An
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 86
                                                                                                                    
Epistemological Approach’, in Bedaux, J. B. B. and Cooke, B., (eds.)
Sociobiology and the Arts, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, 1999,
pp. 223-236
4
 Ludmany, pp. 223-236
45
 Evans, p. 194; Could the stick be the distant ancestor of the magician’s
all-powerful, magic wand, speculates Evans (p. 200)? Apart from the
familiar black and white stick of modern times, magicians almost invariably
have a staff of some kind, as Prospero does in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
As will be explored in more detail in chapter four, myth – even at its most
fantastical - is thought by many to embody practical wisdom. Evans’
speculation is not unreasonable.
46
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind, pp. 54-55
47
 Pinker, p. 327
48
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind p. 96
49
 Kohn, M., and Mithen, S., ‘Handaxes: Products of Sexual Selection?’,
Antiquity vol. 73, pp. 518-526; reproduced on
http://www.antiquityofman.com/handaxes.html visited 28.07.04
50
 Kohn, p. 58
51
 Some have suggested these ‘handaxes’ might have been hafted onto
handles of some sort, but there is little by way of conclusive proof to
support this assertion. The discussion which follows does not address this
possibility.
52
 Isaacs, G., ‘Foundation Stone: early artefacts as indicators of activities
and abilities’ in Bailey, G. N., and Callow, P., (eds.), Stone Age Prehistory:
Studies in memory of Charles McBurney, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1986, quoted in Kohn, p. 59
53
 Kohn, p. 97
54
 Jones, P. R., ‘Results of experimental work in relation to the stone
industries of the Olduvai Gorge’ in Leakey, M., and Roe, D., (eds.), Olduvai
Gorge vol 5: Excavations in Beds III-IV and the Mesele Beds 1968-71,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995; cited by Kohn, pp. 97-98
5
 Kohn and Mithen
56
 Evans, p. 192
57
 Kohn, p. 59
58
 Kohn and Mithen; Mithen, ‘Handaxes: The First Aesthetic Artefacts’, pp.
261-275
59
 Miller, G. F. ‘Sexual selection for cultural displays’ in Dunbar, Knight C.,
and Power, C., (eds.), The evolution of culture.  Edinburgh University Press,
1999, pp. 71-91; reproduced on the University of New Mexico’s website:
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/cultural_displays.htm visited
04.12.03
60
 Miller, G. F., ‘Book review of The handicap principle: A missing piece of
Darwin’s puzzle, by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, Oxford University Press,
1997’ found at the University of New Mexico’s website,
http://www.unm.edu/-psych/faclty/zahavi_review.htm visited 27.07.04
61
 Veblen, T., The Theory of the Leisure Class, Great Minds Series,
Prometheus Books, New York, 1998, (orig. 1899)
62
 Kohn and Mithen
The origins of the designing brain                                                                          page 87
                                                                                                                    
63
 Although Kohn allows that females may well have also made handaxes.
They were after all, practical tools as well. Knowledge of the skill in making
would enable females better to appraise their suitors’ efforts; they might
also have made them as a means of instructing offspring in the art.
64
 Mithen, S., ‘Handaxes: The First Aesthetic Artefacts’, in Voland, E., and
Grammer, K., (eds.) Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg,
2003, p. 267
65
 Mithen, S., ‘Handaxes: The First Aesthetic Artefacts’, in Voland, E., and
Grammer, K., (eds.) Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg,
2003, p. 267
6
 Kohn and Mithen
67
 Quoted by Kohn and Mithen. The amendments in square brackets are
theirs.
68
 Mithen, S., ‘Handaxes: The First Aesthetic Artefacts’, in Voland, E., and
Grammer, K., (eds.) Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg,
2003, p. 261
69
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind p. 23
70
 Pinker, pp. 201-204
71
 Taken from the Blombos Cave Project website
http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/cape.nsf/pages/blombos visited 17.04.04
72
 Oppenheimer, S., Out of Eden: The peopling of the world, Constable,
London, 2003
p. 29; Pinker broadly agrees: Pinker, pp. 201-204
73
 Oppenheimer, S., Out of Eden: The peopling of the world, Constable,
London, 2003, p. 113
74
 Pinker, pp. 202-204
75
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and
Science, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999
76
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind p. 21
7
 Mithen, S., The Prehistory of the Mind p. 209
78
 Maynard Smith, J., and Szathmáry, E., The Origins of Life: From the Birth
of Life to the Origins of Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. p.
143
79
 ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, as the aphorism goes.
Caveats to the simple interpretation of this gap in remains have already
been provided. However, in principle, it may nonetheless be that nothing
has been found, because nothing (or nothing comparable) was made.
80
 Thornhill claims such comparisons are invalid. His ‘Swiss army knife’,
domain-specific, modular model of the brain rests on the proposition that
each module is the result of members of a particular species negotiating a
particular recurrent environmental feature. ‘Contrary to the belief of some,
the selective forces that designed humans cannot be elucidated directly by
the study of non-human primates…’ In this stricture, he is very much in the
minority. Thornhill, p. 13
81
 Obviously, what I mean here is characters that seem as if they are
purposive, in the manner of the tests for an adaptation in chapter one.