Human cognition: The Australian evidence

Abstract

Cognitive archaeology benefits from the specific record of Australian evidence, which offers important glimpses of early human thinking in its burials and art. Colin Renfrew's insightful Prehistory: the making of the human mind (2007) undervalues the evidence relating to social intelligence (cognitive archaeology) available from Pleistocene Australia, whilst Steven Mithen's The prehistory of the human mind (1996) refers only to recent Aboriginal society. This note directs attention for non-Australian readers to intriguing Australian evidence for modern human behaviour extending across at least 40 millennia. This has been reported in recent broad-ranging and well-documented surveys (Franklin & Habgood 2007; Balme et al. 2009), while Iain Davidson (2010) has contributed a discerning appraisal.