Homo symbolicus : the dawn of language, imagination and spirituality

The emergence of symbolic culture, classically identified with the European cave paintings of the Ice Age, is now seen, in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries, as a complex nonlinear process taking root in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. In this book the archaeologists responsible for some of these new discoveries, flanked by ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission, evolutionary psychologists modelling the emergence of metarepresentations, as well as biologists, philosophers, neuro-scientists and an astronomer combine their research findings. Their results call into question our very conception of human nature and animal behaviour, and they create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage's cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them. Homo Symbolicus Homo Symbolicus Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Table of contents Editors’ introduction Acknowledgements CHAPTER 1: Pan symbolicus CHAPTER 2: The evolution and the rise of human language Carry the baby CHAPTER 3: The origin of symbolically mediated behaviour CHAPTER 4: Middle Stone Age engravings and their significance to the debateon the emergence of symbolic material culture CHAPTER 5: Complex cognition required for compound adhesive manufacture in the Middle Stone Age implies symbolic capacity CHAPTER 6: The emergence of language, art and symbolic thinking CHAPTER 7: The human major transition in relation to symbolic behaviour, including language, imagination, and spirituality CHAPTER 8The living as symbols, the dead as symbols