As We Know it

An account of how the human mind evolved. Marek Kohn offers a theory of mind that suggests how our ancestors might have thought, and seen the world, in the absence of language, gods or culture. He relates that ancient heritage to our humanity, and examines the influence of our hominid past on our own behaviour, as creatures who speak, symbolize and create. Central to the book is a meditation on the handaxe, crafted again and again for hundreds of thousands of years by our proto-human ancestors. In his reconstruction of the uses and meanings of the handaxe, Kohn takes the reader into an alien world that is strangely close to our own. This is a work of sociobiology, in that it applies Darwinism to human culture. Unlike other works of evolutionary psychology , it seeks to recapture Darwnism from the political right, and to show that a better understanding of our evolutionary history need not lead to an imposing of limits on who we are and what we may become.