"To repeat: mind and culture developed concurrently and not successively. Once we recognize this, we find that we know so little about precisely how this development took place, of which we have so few recognizable fossils, that we are reduced to reconstruct it as a sort of conjectural history in the sense of the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The facts about which we know almost nothing are the evolution of those rules of conduct which governed the structure and functioning of the various small groups of men in which the race developed. On this the study of still surviving primitive people can tell us little. Though the conception of conjectural history is somewhat suspect today, when we cannot say precisely how things did happen, to understand how they could have come about may be an important insight. The evolution of society and of language and the evolution of mind raise in this respect the same difficulty: the most important part of cultural evolution, the taming of the savage, was completed long before recorded history begins. It is this cultural evolution which man alone has undergone that now distinguishes him from the other animals."
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Law, Legislation and Liberty
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