What is the history of the human mind?

Answer 1

The nature and origins of hominid intelligence is of natural interest to humans as the most successful and intelligent hominid species. As nearly a century of archaeological research has shown, the hominids evolved from earlier primates in eastern Africa. Like some non-primate tree-dwelling mammals, such as opossums, they evolved an opposable thumb, which enabled them to grasp and manipulate objects, such as fruit. They also possessed front-facing binocular vision.

Around 10 million years ago, the earth's climate entered a cooler and drier phase, which led eventually to the ice ages. This forced tree-dwelling animals to adapt to their new environment or die out. Some primates adapted to this challenge by adopting bipedalism: walking on their hind legs. This gave their eyes greater elevation and the ability to see approaching danger further off. At some point the bipedal primates developed the ability to pick up sticks, bones and stones and use them as weapons, or as tools for tasks such as killing smaller animals or cutting up carcases. In other words, these primates developed the use of technology, an adaptation no other animals have attained. Bipedal tool-using primates became hominids, of which the earliest species, such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, are dated to about 7 million years ago.

From about 5 million years ago, the hominid brain began to develop rapidly, because an evolutionary loop had been established between the hominid hand and brain. The use of tools conferred a crucial evolutionary advantage on those hominids which had this skill. The use of tools required a larger and more sophisticated brain to co-ordinate the fine hand movements required for this task. By 2 million years ago Homo habilis had appeared in east Africa: the first hominid to make tools rather than merely use them. These hominids developed language, and the range of activities we call culture, including art and religion.

About 200,000 years ago Europe and the Near East were colonised by hominids known to us as Neanderthal man. They decorated their tools for aesthetic pleasure and buried their dead in way which suggest spiritual beliefs. Despite these modern characteristics, the Neanderthals were no match for the more numerous homo sapiens when he entered the region about 40,000 years ago, and by 25,000 years ago they were extinct. Between 120,000 to 165,000 years ago Homo sapiens had reached his modern physical form in Africa, and was already the unchallenged master of the physical environment, able to hunt and kill any other terrestrial animal and (almost) immune to predators.

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Answer 2

Each human mind has its own mental life. The history of mental life is the life history of the human mind. Each individual has a historical record of his or her own mental life-MEMORY.

As well, there is intellectual history and the history of philosophy which record and tell various stories about ideas which cast the most historical influence upon the social, cultural, political, personal and mental development of humankind.

The history of the scientific study of the human mind is the history of psychology.

Answer 3

History is of things or beings and mind is neither a thing( surely it's not brain) nor a being. So no history. Mind is perpetual.

Answer 4

Philosophy.

Answer 5

the cerebral cortex put us ahead of the lower life forms....somewheres in the neighborhood of 100,000 years ago... At what point did we develop consciousness? Good question. We evolved from the more primitive limbic, instinctive part of our brain to a more rational and logical creature thanks to the cerebral cortex.