The roots of thinking /

Through a series of paleoanthropological case studies, the author of this innovative work traces the roots of basic human concepts--the ideas of number, of the arbitrary sounds of language, and of the cutting edge on a tool--to the corporeal self-knowledge of ancestral hominids; thinking that was modeled on the body (on chewing, on the back-front relation, or on upright posture) shaped and was shaped by the direction of evolution. The work is grounded in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and in analogies between ontogenesis (infant learning processes) and phylogenesis (hominid evolution). In analyzing paleolithic cave art, for example, Sheets-Johnstone moves from the child's early learning of "insideness" through eating, defecating, bleeding, etc., to the comprehension of the linguistic form "in," to the prehistoric desire to work magic analogously by transforming the insides of caves and to do so by creating new insides by enclosing spaces with lines: thus the focus on shape over movement in cave drawings. Sheets-Johnstone's call to take the body seriously is welcome; the analogical method and specific conclusions may be contested. Graduate level. J. R. Bowen Washington University