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The evolution of cognition is the process by which life on Earth has gone from organisms with little to no cognitive function to a greatly varying display of cognitive function that we see in organisms today. Animal cognition is largely studied by observing behavior, which makes studying extinct species difficult.
Merlin Donald has claimed that human thought has progressed through three historic stages: the episodic, the mimetic, and the mythic stages, before reaching the current stage of theoretic thinking or culture. [2] According to him the final transition occurred with the invention of science in Ancient Greece. [3]
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [40] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
In fact, humans have shown an enormous increase in brain size and intelligence over millions of years of evolution. [39] This is because humans have been referred to as an 'evolved cultural species'; one that has an unrivalled reliance on culturally transmitted knowledge due to the social environment around us. [40]
The only human fossils found before the discovery of Java Man in the 1890s were either of anatomically modern humans or of Neanderthals that were too close, especially in the critical characteristic of cranial capacity, to modern humans for them to be convincing intermediates between humans and other primates.
Cultural evolutionary models may also shed light on why although evidence of behavioral modernity exists before 50,000 years ago, it is not expressed consistently until that point. With small population sizes, human groups would have been affected by demographic and cultural evolutionary forces that may not have allowed for complex cultural traits.
Machery argues that while the idea that humans have an "essence" is a very old idea, the idea that all humans have a unified human nature is relatively modern; for a long time, people thought of humans as "us versus them" and thus did not think of human beings as a unified kind. [90]
Some Muslims around the world believe "humans and other living things have evolved over time", [9] [10] yet some others believe they have "always existed in present form". [11] Some Muslims believe that the processes of life on Earth started from one single point of species [12] with a mixture of water and a viscous clay-like substance.