figurines being baked in simple but remarkably effective kilns. 
Hunting became more complex, and fish and bird bones show up 
for the first time in food refuse. The list of Cro-Magnon achieve- 
ments could go on and on, but the point is already evident: these 
people were most profoundly us, and possessed of a sensibility then 
totally unprecedented in human history. As we have seen, innova- 
tion in human evolution, technological as well as anatomical, had 
previously been sporadic, and it is fair to say that with only a couple 
of exceptions (the first bipeds and the first toolmakers), new kinds 
of hominids had essentially done what their predecessors did, if a 
little bit better. With the emergence of behaviorally modern Homo 
sapiens, however, a totally unprecedented entity was on the scene. 
This hominid is not simply an extrapolation of earlier trends in hu- 
man evolution. 
The Human Capacity 
So what happened? As I’ve noted, essentially this issue was the 
cause of the deepest disagreement that ever fissured the relationship 
between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin firmly 
believing that natural selection was the unambiguous explanation of 
human consciousness, while Wallace simply couldn’t see how this 
could be so. And as I’ve also said, it seems to me that both men 
were right, in different ways. Consciousness is the product of our 
brains, which are in turn the product of a long evolutionary history. 
But the properties of the modern human brain are quite clearly emer- 
gent, the result of a chance coincidence of acquisitions. For, while 
natural selection plays an essential role in the evolutionary process, 
it is not a creative force; it has to act on variations that come into 
existence spontaneously. Nothing arises for anything, and natural 
selection can only work on variations presented to it. We must thus 
conclude that the immediate ancestor of modern humans possessed 
a brain that had, for whatever reason, evolved to a point where a 
single developmental change, or genetically related group of 
changes, was sufficient to create a structure with an entirely new 
potential. 
But this is probably not the whole story. Recall that the earliest 
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