Both Darwin and neo-Darwinist theorists like Stephen Jay Gould were wrong to suppose that human nature and the human mind arose out of biological and historical sources alone. Three Prehistoric Inventions That Shaped Us argues that humans are very different from other animals in certain respects and, because of those respects, some of the most important sources of the particular sort of human nature we possess at the present moment, and of the special types of thinking in which we now are able to engage, were cultural ones. To be more specific, it shows that our present-day human nature was shaped in fundamental ways by at least three intellectual inventions that some of our prehistoric ancestors made-namely, the inventions of religious consciousness, of domestication of animals, and of syntactically organized language.
