Having been raised as a hunter/gatherer, I think/feel I have some extra insight into the cognition required to be one: what is happening in the mind when one sets snares or traps for target animals, reading their tracks and traces, stalking them for a clean kill shot, etc. The easiest tracks to read are those of fellow humans. In sum, it takes both theory of mind and mental time travel to read trackways.
The social trackways theory I have been working on for the last ten years is based on an insight I had when I was tracking animals in Canada when I was twelve (I am now 64), and it goes like this: long before we were fully human (Homo erectu…
Having been raised as a hunter/gatherer, I think/feel I have some extra insight into the cognition required to be one: what is happening in the mind when one sets snares or traps for target animals, reading their tracks and traces, stalking them for a clean kill shot, etc. The easiest tracks to read are those of fellow humans. In sum, it takes both theory of mind and mental time travel to read trackways.
The social trackways theory I have been working on for the last ten years is based on an insight I had when I was tracking animals in Canada when I was twelve (I am now 64), and it goes like this: long before we were fully human (Homo erectus, for instance), we began reading each others', our own, and then other animal's trackways. Finally we became smart enough to plan ahead and create our own conventional signs to mark out the best trails to follow and to communicate with other humans. These words I am writing now are thought-prints--in short, if we had not entered the unique cognitive niche of trackways reading we would never have developed cumulative culture and communication. Trackways tell stories, and that is why our minds can think up schemes for the future, counterfactual stories about the past, and cannot help but relate and think in narratives. Our very self-awareness is based on the same cognitive auto-biographical self-projecting processes. In sum then, for us humans life is a narrative conversation,we are high fidelity/fast-track learners par excellence, and we cannot mentally survive without other humans to tell our stories to.
