The Prehistory Of The Mind

Author : Steven J. Mithen
Publisher : Orion Publishing Group
ISBN 13 : 9780753802045
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Prehistory of the Mind written by Steven J. Mithen and published by Orion Publishing Group. This book was released on 1998 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s consensus opinion is that the mind is like a collection of specialised modules each tasked for a specific purpose. The author seeks to elucidate and account for this theory and explain what it means to be human in this context.

Author : Steven J. Mithen
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
ISBN 13 : 9780500281000
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Prehistory of the Mind written by Steven J. Mithen and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses prehistoric artifacts to develop a theory about how human intelligence has evolved

Author : Colin Renfrew
Publisher : Modern Library
ISBN 13 : 0812976614
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prehistory written by Colin Renfrew and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of written records–the overwhelming majority of our time here on earth–and gives an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the past, and of how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to light. Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline, detailing how breakthroughs such as radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have helped us to define humankind’s past–how things have changed–much more clearly than was possible just a half century ago. As for why things have changed, Renfrew pinpoints some of the issues and challenges, past and present, that confront the study of prehistory and its investigators. Renfrew then offers a summary of human prehistory from early hominids to the rise of literate civilization that is refreshingly free of conventional wisdom and grand “unified” theories. In this invaluable account, Colin Renfrew delivers a meticulously researched and passionately argued chronicle about our life on earth–and our ongoing quest to understand it.

Author : Lambros Malafouris
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262528924
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Things Shape the Mind written by Lambros Malafouris and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present. An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.

Author : Steven Mithen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134720130
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory written by Steven Mithen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-10 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how our understanding of human creativity can be extended by exploring this phenomenon during human evolution and prehistory.

Author : Chris Gosden
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198803516
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prehistory written by Chris Gosden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent archaeological discoveries from China and central Asia have changed our understanding of how human civilization developed in the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history. In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Chris Gosden explores the current theories on the ebb and flow of human cultural variety.

Author : John F. Hoffecker
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023151848X
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Landscape of the Mind written by John F. Hoffecker and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Landscape of the Mind, John F. Hoffecker explores the origin and growth of the human mind, drawing on archaeology, history, and the fossil record. He suggests that, as an indirect result of bipedal locomotion, early humans developed a feedback relationship among their hands, brains, and tools that evolved into the capacity to externalize thoughts in the form of shaped stone objects. When anatomically modern humans evolved a parallel capacity to externalize thoughts as symbolic language, individual brains within social groups became integrated into a "neocortical Internet," or super-brain, giving birth to the mind. Noting that archaeological traces of symbolism coincide with evidence of the ability to generate novel technology, Hoffecker contends that human creativity, as well as higher order consciousness, is a product of the superbrain. He equates the subsequent growth of the mind with human history, which began in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. As anatomically modern humans spread across the globe, adapting to a variety of climates and habitats, they redesigned themselves technologically and created alternative realities through tools, language, and art. Hoffecker connects the rise of civilization to a hierarchical reorganization of the super-brain, triggered by explosive population growth. Subsequent human history reflects to varying degrees the suppression of the mind's creative powers by the rigid hierarchies of nationstates and empires, constraining the further accumulation of knowledge. The modern world emerged after 1200 from the fragments of the Roman Empire, whose collapse had eliminated a central authority that could thwart innovation. Hoffecker concludes with speculation about the possibility of artificial intelligence and the consequences of a mind liberated from its organic antecedents to exist in an independent, nonbiological form.

Author : Robert J. Wenke
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 636 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Patterns in Prehistory written by Robert J. Wenke and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive review of world prehistory is organized around the five topics central to archaeology: the origins of culture, the development of physically "modern" people, Pleistocene cultures, the establishment of agricultural economies, and the rise of complex states and empires. It presents a coherent philosophy of the field, reflecting the "new archaeology" of the 1960s and 70s while reviewing the methodological revisions of the 80s, and relates the archaeological data from hundreds of sites to the great questions of prehistorical change. Thoroughly revised and updated to include new scholarship and the most recent discoveries, the Third Edition features new material on the Neanderthals, Pleistocene cave art, and ancient Egypt, as well as many new illustrations and an analysis of modern archaeological theory within the context of Western intellectual history. Always clear and lively, Patterns in Prehistory is that rare book that will fascinate general readers and scholars alike.

Author : Steven Mithen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Prehistory of the Mind written by Steven Mithen and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Steven J. Mithen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674021921
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Singing Neanderthals written by Steven J. Mithen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of our language instinct. Steven Mithen draws on a huge range of sources, from neurological case studies, through child psychology and the communication systems of non-human primates to the latest paleoarchaeological evidence.