Middle Stone Age - Brain Change

Brain Change

Although the advent of anatomical physical modernity cannot confidently be linked with palaeoneurological change, it does seem probable that hominid brains evolved through the same selection processes as other body parts. Genes that promoted a capacity for symbolism may have been selected suggesting the foundations for symbolic culture may well be grounded in biology but behaviour that was mediated by symbolism may have only come later, even though this physical capacity was already in place much earlier. Skoyles and Sagan for example argues that human brain expansion by increasing the prefrontal cortex would have created a brain capable of symbolizing its previously nonsymbolic cognition, and that this process, slow to begin with, increasingly accelerated during the last 100,000 years. Symbolically mediated behaviour may have feedback upon this process by creating greater ability to manufacture symbolic artifacts and social networks that were organized upon them.