Episode
From the archive: Revisiting the dawn of human cognition
- Podcast
- Many Minds
- Published
- Sep 4, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3366
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Summary
Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed summer pause—we'll have new episodes for you later in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ------- [originally aired June 1, 2023] There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let's say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and abstract thinking. This story of a kind of "cognitive revolution" in the Upper Paleolithic has been a mainstay of popular discourse for decades. I'm guessing you're familiar with it. It's been discussed in influential books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari; you can read about it on Wikipedia. What you may not know is that this story, compelling as it may be, is almost certainly wrong. My first guest today is Dr. Eleanor Scerri , an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, where she heads the Pan-African Evolution research group. My second guest is Dr. Manuel Will , an archaeologist and Lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Together, Eleanor and Manuel are authors of a new paper titled 'The revolution that still isn't: The origins of behavioral complexity in Homo sapiens. ' In the paper, they pull together a wealth of evidence showing that there really was no cognitive revolution—no one watershed moment in time and space. Rather, the origins of modern human cognition and culture are to be found not in one part of Europe but across Africa. And they're also to be found much earlier than that classic picture suggests. Here, we talk about the…