IT IS one of the hottest questions of our time: how did our cognitive abilities explode, leaving other animals for dust intellectually?
Now a new explanation is emerging. Controversially, it challenges the idea that biology alone is what drove the evolution of intellectual skills. What if we acquired abilities such as the capacity to invent, converse or work in unison as a result of a continual process of cultural cross-fertilisation with the world we inhabit, and through the way we interact with other people and material things?
Not only does this idea help explain how our species blossomed intellectually in…
