Word: thought
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Rove bellows, grimacing at the thought--or at least at the prospect of its being put into print. "There are a lot of people working on this campaign," he insists modestly. "I am just one of them." It is true that Rove is one of three fiercely loyal top aides, dubbed "the Iron Triangle," who have all been with Bush since his first campaign for Governor and who form the impenetrable nucleus of the presidential operation. And it is also true that Joe Allbaugh holds the title of campaign manager and that Karen Hughes, the communications director, is closer...
...trace the complex relations among our sundry ancestors. One remarkable skeleton, announced this past spring, suggests that modern humans and Neanderthals may even have mated successfully. And new evidence of stone-tool use, dating as far back as 2.5 million years, has provided tantalizing clues to how our forebears thought and behaved...
...transition to meat eating. Then, somewhere between 2 million and 1 million years ago, came the dramatic growth of the brain and our ancestors' first emergence from Africa. Finally, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, our own species learned to use that powerful organ for abstract thought, which quickly led to art, music, language and all the other skills that have enthroned humans as the unchallenged rulers of their planet...
...this, Tattersall and others believe, represents a single, profound change: the development of symbolic thought. "Art, symbols, music, notation, language, feelings of mystery, mastery of diverse materials and sheer cleverness: all these attributes, and more, were foreign to the Neanderthals and are native to us," he writes in his 1998 book, Becoming Human. For the first time, innovation was a routine part of human life that could easily be shared with others--not just something that occurred every million years or so. Against that kind of competition, no other human species could hold...
...development of symbolic thought and complex communication did nothing less than alter human evolution. For one thing, high-tech transportation means that the world, though ethnically diverse, now really consists of a single, huge population. "Everything we know about evolution suggests that to get true innovation, you need small, isolated populations," says Tattersall, "which is now unthinkable...