Bootstrapping Ordinal Thinking
In this chapter, the authors apply cognitive neuroscience, gene–culture co-evolution, and extended cognition to account for the evolution of an unusual neurologically grounded trait—the ability to arrange items in ordered sequences. Cognitive neuroscience strongly suggests that the human ability to conceive of and use ordinal sequences such as alphabets and calendars relies on dedicated neural resources, yet ordinal sequences such as these do not exist in nature. There is thus the provocative possibility that ordinal thinking evolved as a specific response to cultural phenomena. But which, and how? Applying the perspectives of extended cognition and gene–culture co-evolution (neuronal recycling in particular), the authors explore the likelihood that ordinal cognition arose through the manipulation of material artifacts, with stringing beads for thousands of generations being one possible scenario.
