The modern mind has produced a staggering list of astonishing behaviors—science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art.

These, singly perhaps, but especially taken together, seem to indicate a still-to-be-explained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: What are the basic mental operations and neurological structures that underlie the human mind? And how did the cognitively modern mind emerge?