Description

What makes us human? There are at least as many answers to this provocative and searching question as there are authors of this compendium. In the various articles you will find suggestions that include the ‘spirit of man’, referring particularly to religion, speech and not just language, imitation and ‘mimetics’, cooking, high levels of cognitive ability, causal belief, that humans are symbolic creatures, innate curiosity and the desire to know, mental time travel, and the ability to read other’s minds. These all have cognitive ability as a common thread and, deriving from this, high-level development of language and cultural transmission.