That, at any rate, is the view of John Tooby. He and his wife and co-researcher, Leda Cosmides, have been two of the leading pioneers of evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, Leda Cosmedes was ill when we recorded this program. John Tooby says we have to leave behind the notion that our minds are blank slates when we come into the world. The notion of the blank slate is something that's had enormous cultural appeal and has been what we call the standard social science model, or the 20th century, and yet I think this model is now passing away.
Evolutionary psychology likes to talk about the 'psychic unity of humankind'.
Whether you're an Aboriginal Australian or a New York Jew, a professor of psychology in Vienna or a goat herder in Ghana, the claim is that the underlying structure of your mind is the same. We all share the same mental programming, the programming which our common hunter-gatherer ancestors had. But recently archaeologists have taken issue with this view. They say that evolutionary psychology has paid too little attention to the archaeological record, and what that tells us about the lives of our early human ancestors. One of those archaeologists is Steven Mithen , author of The Prehistory of the Mind.