Despite the fact that the process started probably five million years ago, it wasn’t really until about a hundred thousand years ago that archeologists tell us that the technology—and when I say “technology” I mean really beautifully designed tools for complicated tasks like stitching, creating fabrics, operating small handheld tools for a variety of reasons—the evidence that, that really became of force for the change of the circumstances of life, of small communities of people.

Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the process started probably five million years ago, it wasn’t really until about a hundred thousand years ago that archeologists tell us that the technology—and when I say “technology” I mean really beautifully designed tools for complicated tasks like stitching, creating fabrics, operating small handheld tools for a variety of reasons—the evidence that, that really became of force for the change of the circumstances of life, of small communities of people. We don’t know why it took so long for that to happen, because we know that stone tools were being manufactured and used regularly at least two million years ago. So, for the whole period of time of the process that led the doubling or tripling of the size of the human brain and its specialization for manipulating objects, during most of that time nothing was happening that produced any cultural artifacts that are of any real interest.

If you set that story aside and say that, that is enough time for the brain to have begun to learn how to accommodate the functional capacity that came into the hand. We know sort of look at the picture of individual child development. How do those two things map onto one another? I would like to tell the story that very early on after the publication of my book; I started going to book signings and book presentations at various places. Always, I was asked the question, “Well, if hands are so important to brain development, how come kids that don’t have hands or who have lost hands seem to do so well? What about the Thalidomide kids?” And, I said, “The way to look at that is you have to separate the long story—the evolutionary story—from the story of what we call ontology, which just means the development of the organism.” The way I look at it, and this is probably oversimplifying it terribly, is that the long story, the long evolutionary process produced a brain that was looking for a pair of hands. When the child is born, that child’s brain is going to start to animate hands—by the way, I’m a brand new grandfather, and this week my new granddaughter is three weeks old. Believe me, I’ve been looking at her hands and they are very busy. They are not capable of a lot of skill, yet, but they are in motion. It’s very interesting to come back to the child.

In the case of the Thalidomide babies, who turn out to be adults who can write with their toes and who can play musical instruments with their feet and their toes, and who can drive cars without any difficulty using their feet and their toes, is that if the brain doesn’t find a pair of hands, it will invent them. That’s what really happens. So, the developmental project for a young child is to bring the brain and the hand into a mutually reinforcing developmental process, around which what we call cognition and the sense of self that’s wrapped up in a body—and I’m just not much of a mind/body separatist. I think that you have to look at intelligence as being a function of the behavior of the entire organism. It’s not a new idea with me. I think if you just want to go and set up camp in the brain and look at what happens in the brain, that’s fine with me, but that has nothing to do with what we call human intelligence.