Steven Mithen > Quotes

“To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.”
― Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

“The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals.”
― Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

“[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.”
― Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

“Without music, the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed.”
― Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

“1879 a little girl ran shouting to her father about bulls – it was the discovery of paintings in Altamira Cave.”
― Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 - 5000 BC

“It is because of this notion [of species essence] that we demand that a severely brain-damaged person should have the same rights as a university professor, or a physically disabled person the same rights as an Olympian sportsman. They are all 'human', whatever their intellectual and physical abilities.”
― Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

“The meanings of words are constantly changing and multiplying— a process termed by linguists as semantic change. We have a hint of this from our own lifetimes: is a wicked mouse an evil rodent or an excellent hand-held input device for a computer? The word table once only referred to a piece of furniture with a flat top, but has not only become a verb, but one with two opposing meanings. In the UK, 'to table' means the process of presenting a proposal, while in the US, 'to table' means postponing the consideration of a proposal. We can, however, only appreciate the scale and significance of word change when comparing historical sequences of written texts of the same language.”
― Steven Mithen, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved