More than Language: An Ensemble Account of the Origin of the Human Mind

What is it about?

The ensemble hypothesis of human origins proposes that language is but one of five cognitive capacities that separate our cognition qualitatively from other animal cognition as a result of their interactions. The ensemble consists of an ability to travel in time mentally, to mentalize or understand the minds of others, to use language for overt communication, to control short-term or working memory through executive attention, and to think through the interpreter of the brain’s left-hemisphere employing inner speech and causal inference. Numerous studies in contemporary psychology and neuroscience document all five ensemble components.

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Photo by Rabah Al Shammary on Unsplash

Photo by Rabah Al Shammary on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Evidence of cognitive and behavioral modernity, such as cave art, in anatomically modern Homo sapiens greatly expanded during the Upper Paleolithic about 40,000 years ago. The emergence of symbolic thinking and language is the traditional explanation proposed in cognitive archaeology, despite some indicators of symbolic artifacts among earlier hominins, including Neanderthals. The ensemble hypothesis offers a novel explanation for the pattern of archaeological evidence. The flourishing of symbolic artifacts during the Upper Paleolithic occurred because, for the first time, mental time travel, mentalizing, language, the left-hemisphere interpreter, and executive attention were at last in place and interacting in Homo sapiens. Experiments assessing how these components interact offer a way to test the viability of the hypothesis.

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