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Summary: The Birth Of Symbolic Thought

Decent Essays

David Lavallee
Professor Limnatis
C&E Social Sciences
14 September 2014
Birth of Symbolic Thought Review
Culture and Expression’s first required text is “An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens” by Ian Tattersall. The text is a short article that reviews the evolution of human beings. It describes what older species of the genus Homo looked like: body shape, bone structure, brain size, skull orientation, and know physical characteristics. Tattersall begins by truly looking at the roots of our civilization, where humans came from and how we are the byproduct resulting from millions of years of history. Early on in the article, it is discovered that more significant than physical traits, is our symbolic cognition, which separates our species from the rest of the environment. Tattersall says that it is this ‘strong apartness from the rest of Nature’ that drove humans to advance swifter than the competition . This is a crucial part of the article because it shifts the focus from physical traits to social …show more content…

Their cognitive potential is extremely unique. There are beautiful jewelry, artwork, instruments and spear throwers all created within from around 10 thousand, to 40 thousand years ago. Another main component is creativity, the thought of humans in alternate worlds, for example, believing in an afterlife, no matter what religion it is. The fact that humans could conceptually imagine and construct a religion is remarkable. The largest factor in all of this may have been language. Something that others did not have, the fact that humans could communicate using language could be the answer to the exponential development. The humans that we know today socialize, what separates us is our ability to communicate with one another, our ability to think critically of all the possible situations, and to form a culture with one another expressing ideas and beliefs

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