NPR Story on Symbolic Thought

I just heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that centered on when we became mentally modern human beings.  In our evolutionary history, the show argues, the appearance of symbolic thought marks the genesis of uniquely human developments more than say, standing upright.  And I agree.  On a daily basis, we move more from idea to idea than from place to place.

One of the surprises in the story was that when a few people were asked the question “What is symbolic thought?” they didn’t think they knew.  When asked about what a symbol is, they got stuck on fairly big individual symbols like flags, peace symbols and crosses.  They didn’t consider, for example, the word tree or the number 2.  In fact, in a show about symbolic thought, mathematics didn’t come up at all.

Notches cut into a baboon bone that is approximately 35,000 years old is evidence of some of the earliest mental organizing we did.  Counting, it seems, predates language.  And the age of the notched baboon bone corresponds, in time, to some of the earliest cave paintings found.  The mind is exploring so much in those paintings and expressing what it finds.  These are clearly very early demonstrations of our talent for abstraction or symbolic thought and they are the ground that grows the vast conceptual landscapes in which we live today.

But the NPR story wanted to push things even further back, and found what they called a fossil record of early symbolic thought in shells collected by archeologist Chris Henshilwood.   The shells were found in sand layers from 75,000 years ago on the western coast of South Africa.  They had little holes in them, that came from being strung, like beads.  Henshilwood is convinced that the beads had meaning, that they said something about the person wearing them, i.e.,that they were symbolic. We don’t usually  think of jewelry as symbolic thinking.  But there is meaning in much of it, the wedding band, worn on the left hand, or the many symbolic things we wear around our necks.

Worth taking note of in this story is the difficulty we have actually seeing ourselves (hence the blank minds when asked about symbolic thought) and the unexpected ways we get a glimpse (like shells in 75,000 year old sand).  Taking a fresh look, without thinking we already know, is the way to valuable insight.  And I’m committed to the idea that a fresh look at what mathematics does, without thinking we already know what it is, will get us a pretty interesting look at ourselves.