indeed, we can probably look upon the considerable achievements 
of the Neanderthals as the ultimate example of what intuition can 
do; but it is almost certainly symbolic thought that, above all, dif- 
ferentiates us from them—and from every other hominid, indeed 
every other organism, that has ever existed. For it is surely symbolic 
reasoning that makes consciousness as we know it possible, given 
that only by symbolically recreating the world in our minds can we 
objectify not only ourselves but our own positions in that world. 
The strong signal from the behavior record, then, is that our ac- 
quisition of the human capacity was a recent, and emergent, hap- 
pening. Much as paleoanthropologists like to think of our evolution 
as a linear affair, a gradual progress from primitiveness to perfection, 
this received wisdom is clearly in error. We are not simply the in- 
evitable result of a remorseless process of fine-tuning over the eons, 
any more than we are the summit of creation. For all of our re- 
markable—and recently acquired—cognitive attributes, we are but 
one of numerous evolutionary experiments spawned by our diverse 
family Hominidae. Yes, there has been an overall trend within Hom- 
inidae toward an increase in relative brain size over the past 2 mil- 
lion years or so, suggesting that there is something about being 
hominid (or at least a member of Homo) that predisposes to this 
trend. And yes, it is unquestionably the unique cognitive features 
resulting from our own particular experiment that account for the 
fact that we are the lone hominid in the world today, as for so much 
else. But we risk deceiving ourselves if we try to link such obser- 
vations too closely. The archaeological record of human behavioral 
evolution shows clearly that the human capacity, whatever the neural 
mechanisms and cultural stimuli underlying it, is the end result of 
a long and untidy history of sporadic accretion. More significantly, 
however, it powerfully suggests that the final acquisition of this re- 
markable capacity was not simply a gradual extrapolation of what 
had gone before. Instead, this event of events was a sudden and 
emergent one—whose roots, perhaps ironically, were firmly embed- 
ded in the prosaic evolutionary phenomenon of exaptation. 
a5 
