Up to now, working in isolation, both archaeology and neuroscience have made a number of important contributions to the study of human intelligence. Archaeology, for instance, can now give us a good idea about where, and an approximate idea about when, Homo sapiens appeared. The place is Africa and the time somewhere between 100000 and 200000 years ago. Recent DNA studies can now confirm the out-of-Africa human dispersal hypothesis of approximately 60000 years ago, whereas new archaeological discoveries, like the findings from the Blombos Cave in Africa, have changed our understanding of when and where the emergence of most behavioural features usually associated with modern human intelligence first appeared (Renfrew 2008). Neuroscience, on the other hand, based on a quite different scale of spatial and temporal resolution can also give as a good indication about where in the human brain these modern human capacities (e.g. language, symbolic capacity, representational ability, theory of mind (ToM), causal belief, learning by teaching, ‘we’ intentionality, sense of selfhood) can be identified and the possible neural networks and cognitive mechanisms that support them.

The challenge facing us then is how do we put all these different facets and threads of evidence about the human condition back together again? Naturally, the attempted cooperation and cross-fertilization is not an easy task given the different kinds of information, procedures and analytic scales that define the ways the human mind is approached and understood from different disciplinary perspectives. However, if our attempted cross-disciplinary experiment is to add something new and important to our current knowledge then it needs to move beyond the logic of the ‘localizer’ and tell us something about the why and how rather than simply the where and when of human cognitive becoming. Knowing when and where things are happening in cognitive evolution is important and interesting but does not explain much. Focusing on the interface between brain and culture, the papers that comprise this special Theme Issue struggle to define, reframe and identify some crucial aspects of the human condition, which we think could facilitate this attempted partnership between archaeology and neuroscience.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlere...i?artid=2394570

Wow...good stuff Belle. That was a fantastic article...long, oy...paybacks are hell, hehe ....but well worth the read.

Wished I had time to comment further. Loved it!!! Thank you so much for posting this! A great find for sure.

I'm gonna read it again. We live in the most exciting times ever. I get butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it.

OxO,

~V