The question of where our cognitive abilities come from is one that  now has researchers drawing upon archeology and nueroscience to look at the role of culture rather than simply biology in the development of the human mind.

The theory  goes something like this: homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago with various biologically determined innate traits and then the biology and structure of our brains stopped developing about 60,000 years ago and other factors took over as drivers of human development. Already in place by that stage was adequate working memory to  retain memories, recognise events and objects in the present and the ability to plan ahead, The controversial idea is that 'culture' ran as software  over  this ' hardware' and how we interacted with other people and the events and objects in the world around us shaped our minds and cognitive abilities almost as if they were malleable  plastic. .

So  the human mind develops as the  result of continual cross cultural  fertilisation  from a position of possessing enough  working memory and experience to  develop  a ' theory of mind' ,  an awareness of the existence of other intelligent creatures capable of independent thought and intention and the ability to separate them from our own.

This theory seeks to explain our ability to, say,  improvise, converse and work together at the most basic level as being culturally rather than biologically determined achievements, and layererd  upon that the incremental honing of abilities to accumulatively and collectively learn as a function of culture and human interaction. In other words to not only recognise self, others and the importance of learning from experience but to recognise the value of focussed training and  education for the individual, family and group as means of developing the mind..

Reseachers are interested in identifying and hammering down important neurological breakthrough points wherever possible but the flipside of all this is that if culture largely drove  our cognitive abilities then it must still be doing so and this may explain why so many people feel at odds with an empty materialistic monoculture that has done more in the last 100 years than the last 200,000 to  not only threaten our existence on this planet but the viability of the planet itself.

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