Advances in the study of the origin of humanness

摘要

In a paper published in 2000, McBrearty and Brooks argued for the cognitive unity of Homo sapiens as a species. We asserted that the cognitive abilities of early members of our species were indistinguishable from our own, and that the early signs of this ability appear in the record of the African Middle Stone Age. Innovations were produced by the normal process of invention and do not require special genetic mutations to explain them. Gaps in the spatial and temporal distribution of archaeological traits are a normal product of the nature of the archaeological record. In this paper I review research since 2000 and conclude that it has vindicated this view and has begun to fill in perceived gaps in the African record for early behavioral modernity.