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transient as the evidence they cite. Most human evolution theories of twenty or fifty years ago are barely worth reading now because, by tying themselves too closely to the physical evidence then available, they aimed too much for empirical respectability at the expense of theoretical coherence. The theories that remain relevant are those derived from fundamental principles of evolutionary biology and commonsense observations about the human mind. Darwin's thoughts on the human mind's evolution in The Descent of Man are still useful because he did not overreact to the new discoveries of Neanderthal skulls and living gorillas that fascinated Victorian London. Classic selection pressures are more important than classic fossils.
A final limitation is that fossil and archeological evidence has proven much more informative about how our ancestors could afford the energy costs of large brains, than about what they actually used their brains for. Evidence in the last decade has revealed how our ancestors evolved the ability to exploit energy-rich foods such as game animals that could be hunted for meat,
and underground tubers that could be dug up and cooked. These energy-rich foods could also be digested using shorter intestines than other apes have. As anthropologist Leslie Aiello has argued, since guts use a lot of energy our smaller guts also increased our energy budget above what is available to other apes. The ability to exploit these new food sources, at a lower gut-cost, could have allowed our ancestors to afford larger bodies, larger brains, more milk production, or whatever other costly traits evolution might have favored. But a higher energy budget does not in itself explain why our brains expanded, or why any of our distinctive human abilities evolved. Sexual selection principles, not fossil evidence, may explain why we wasted so much of our energy on biological luxuries like talking, dancing, painting, laughing, playing sports, and inventing rituals.
An evolutionary account of the human mind cannot be constructed directly from fossils and stone artifacts. As archeologist Steven Mithen argued in his thoughtful book The Prehistory of the Mind , the physical evidence of prehistory must be interpreted in a much more sophisticated evolutionary psychology framework. Yet many scientists still have a special reverence for archeological evidence which is out of all proportion to what it can tell us about mental evolution. Fossils were certainly critical in convincing people that we had actually evolved in continuous stages from primate ancestors—almost 50 percent of Americans now accept the fossil evidence for human evolution. But evidence supporting the fact of human evolution is not always the best evidence for the mechanism of human evolution. A more fruitful place to start theorizing about the past is the present: the current capacities of the human mind (the adaptations to be explained) and the principles of current evolutionary biology (the selection pressures that can explain them). Bones and stones can be valuable sources of evidence, but they become most useful when combined with studies of other primates, and with studies of humans in tribal societies, modern societies, and psychology laboratories.
This may sound like a radical change in scientific method, but it isn't. In broadening the focus from stones and bones to the
comparative analysis of present adaptations, I am in fact proposing something rather conservative: that the evolutionary psychology of the human mind can play by the same scientific rules as the evolutionary biology that studies any other adaptation in any other species. It can present a bold theory about the function of the adaptation and the selection pressures that produced it, and see whether the adaptation has special features consistent with that function and those origins. Paleontology makes useful contributions to such studies, but it is not the most important source of data on the design and