Richard Leakey

Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself... The second... was the origin of multicellular organisms... The origin of human consciousness... was the third... Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends.

If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't.

The question... is whether Upper Paleolithic art bears the telltale signs of Lewis-Williams' three stage neuropsychological model, and could thus be shamanistic art.

We are justified in calling all species of bipedal ape "human." ...the adaptation of bipedalism was so loaded with evolutionary potential—freeing the upper limbs to be free to become manipulative implements one day—that its importance should be recognized in our nomenclature. These humans were not like us, but without the bipedal adaptation they couldn't have become us.

Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art... This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. ...The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. ...images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.

Jerison argues that we should think of brains as creating a species' version of reality. ...As brains enlarged through evolutionary time, more channels of sensory information could be handled more completely, and their input integrated more thoroughly.

Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

Rather than living as aggregations of families in nomadic bands, as modern hunter-gatherers do, the first humans probably lived like savanna baboons.

If the molecular evidence is correct... almost five million years passed between the time our ancestors became bipedal and the time when they started making stone tools. Whatever the evolutionary force that produced a bipedal ape, it was not linked with the ability to make and use tools. However, many anthropologists believe that the advent of technology 2.5 million years ago did coincide with the beginnings of brain expansion.

[Fred] Spoor's observations are truly startling, In all species of the genus Homo, the inner ear structure is indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Similarly, in all species of Australopithecus, the semicircular canals look like those of apes. Does this mean that the australopithecines moved about as apes do—that is, quadrupedally? The structure of the pelvis and lower limbs speaks against this conclusion. So does a remarkable discovery my mother made in 1976: a trail of very humanlike footprints made in a layer of volcanic ash some 3.75 million years ago.

It is impossible to imagine existence in the absence of subjective sensation we call reflective consciousness.

The major sites, such as Altamira, are often surrounded by smaller sites within a 10-mile radius, as if they were centers of political or social alliance.