Dawn of the Creative Mind : The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Innovation

This book offers bold new theories of creativity and cultural evolution, and explains why these processes are fundamentally entwined. Drawing from psychology, evolutionary theory, archaeology, and cognitive science, it ultimately shows how and why creativity is a distinctly human source of innovation, healing, connection, and change.

In a world of constant change, where new challenges demand novel solutions, understanding creativity has never been more essential. How do we create? How did we become so creative? Given that ideas adapt and build on one another, in what sense does culture evolve? Synthesizing research from psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, computational models, evolutionary theory, and first-person accounts, this book reveals how creativity sparks innovation, heals inner turmoil, connects minds, and fuels cultural change. It advances an ambitious, original theory of how the creative process works, and a theory of cultural evolution that can account for difficult-to-explain features, such as cross-domain transfer, and our highly cooperative nature. The text traces the lifespan of ideas from conception, to gestation, to birth, to their release into the world, where they acquire new forms, adapting to the new minds in which they take up residence.