There is something about a big campfire.  Small cooking hearths are very useful but, beginning about 120,000 years ago in South Africa, the archaeologists start finding them supplemented by a bigger hearth.  Psychologically, it’s very attractive – a community bonfire pulls in people from all round the camp.

            Back then, did someone tell origin stories around the campfire?  That date, in the middle of the prior warm period in the ice ages, is an enigmatic date, as you’ll discover about halfway through my origin story.  Homo sapiens was around by then – they looked a lot like us, big brains and all – but behaviorally they weren’t yet us, the innovative species known as Homo sapiens sapiens, a people not doubly wise so much as far more creative.  It wasn’t until about 50,000 years ago that they were finally doing things that cause us to say, “They must have thought a lot like we do.”  At that point, they surely appreciated campfire storytelling.

          "Can you tell the story of the world in an evening around the campfire, the way an old-fashioned shaman used to do?"  This was the challenge that the historian David Fromkin took up in writing his short book, The Way of the World.  It mostly focused, as historians do, on the time scale of civilizations, going back perhaps 6,000 years.  There are other admirable short histories which have inspired me, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, on the cosmological time scale of the 13 billion years that began with the Big Bang.

            My origin story starts at 7 million years ago, so as to cover the time since we emerged from the great apes.  To understand the emergence of mind – and particularly the higher aspects of consciousness that so set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom – we need to understand what the great apes are capable of.   And what they don’t do.  That will help us appreciate what happened in ape-to-human brain evolution since we last shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos of Africa.

            It is just in the last 1 percent of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity and technological capabilities have really blossomed.  It’s been called “The Mind’s Big Bang.”  In our usual expansive sense of “mind,” the history of the mind is surprisingly brief, certainly when compared with the long increase in brain size and the halting march of toolmaking.  What came before was not, as we usually assume, a series of increasing approximations to the modern mind.  So what set the stage for this creative explosion?

            The modern mind of Homo sapiens sapiens is so startling, when seen against its evolutionary background, that it is worth the effort to tell the up-from-the-apes story in a space short enough so that all the intermediate stages will linger together in the reader’s working memory, reverberating off one another, creating a living contrast that might help illuminate mind’s future.

 

There are many ways to write a book like this, depending on the author’s viewpoint.  We all tend to deal with the same set of facts, but our intellectual backgrounds and interests differ.  Most people writing on the subject were trained in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, or evolutionary biology.

            I tend to look at the problem from the standpoint of a neurobiologist, always trying to figure out how nerve cells can analyze the world, make sensible plans for movement, and manage those interneurons that convert thought into action.  This is the brain mechanic’s time scale of how.  I was driven to looking into the evolutionary setup for why things work the way they presently do.  And, since I try to deal with brain circuitry for language and creative plans, I was looking for insights from the comparison of human brains to those of our closest cousins that lack these behaviors.  I tend to be impressed by self-organization, emergent properties of neural circuitry, and fast tracks in evolution.  For better or worse, this book reflects those issues more than would be found in most books on human evolution.  Read widely.

            Like most brain researchers, I am inconsistent in using the term ‘mind.’  Yes, the brain does it all.  It is something like the software-hardware distinction – but we are really dealing with the advanced products here, higher intellectual function, and ‘mind’ is the term that gets across the complexities.  This is not a brief history of the brain.

 

We tend to see ourselves as the narrator of a life story, always situated at a crossroads between past and future, swimming in speculation.  We can construct alternative explanations for how we got where we are, emphasizing one aspect or another as a path.  Looking ahead, we imagine various trajectories.  We refine our guesses, editing out the nonsense, and achieve a clearer glimpse of our crossroad choices.

            Because our less imaginative ancestors couldn’t think about the future in much detail, they were trapped in a here-and-now existence.  They could anticipate routine happenings (like meals), but not in our extended sense of speculation and worry.  No “what if” and “why me?”  They were conscious in the sense of choosing between alternative courses of action, but with their unstructured type of mental life, you couldn’t narrate a life story or conceive of dying someday.  Without creative intelligence, there’s no crossroad and no end of the road.

            I intend this brief history of the mind to itself be a vista from a crossroads, looking back at simpler versions of mental life, taking stock of what we have now, and then speculating about mind’s future.  For we are at a crossroads in another sense, that of a frontier where the rules are about to change, where mind shifts gears again.

            That’s my brief history (you’ll have to provide your own campfire).  Instead of starting with a big bang, I lead up to one – and then look beyond, to contemplate mind’s next advances.