More than 150 years ago, disputes about the origin of the human mind led to the alienation of Alfred Russell Wallace from the elite group of scientists led by Charles Darwin. Wallace, unlike Darwin, could not admit that the human mind is just an organ that evolved like any other.
A historian from Daremsk University, Neil Thomas notes that for Wallace “on mature reflection, the simple transformation of the monkey into a person has become unacceptable, and he could no longer agree with the ontological equality of people and animals proposed by Darwin.” So Wallace was in the shade, and Darwin became an icon of evolutionary theory.
However, Wallace’s skepticism was justified. There is still no evidence that the human mind has evolved naturally. No one knows how our ancestors began to think like people.
Nevertheless, popular scientific publications like to publish stories about the origin of the mind. Various hypotheses were put forward: mental illness, throwing excrement chimpanzees, cooking, sexual selection, wearing babies and much more. None of them look plausible, since each requires faith that the material can accidentally create an intangible.
Moreover, some approaches were frankly harmful. For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, African Pygmay Ot Beng was exhibited in the zoo as “not quite a person.” Later, paleontologists tried to find such “not quite people” among extinct groups, such as Neanderthals and Flores people. However, none of these groups turned out to be as primitive as the theory of the “missing link.” On the contrary, Neanderthal art refuted such ideas.
Historical evidence indicates that people thought like people thousands of years earlier than expected. The phrase “earlier than thought” became a cliche in scientific circles. In May 2023, it was found that the controlled use of fire began 250 thousand years ago. In June of the same year, stone guns were found 700 thousand years old. These findings