example, James Steele and his colleagues found that, on average, 301 strikes were needed to form Acheulian biface hand-axes (the third kind, associated with H. erectus ), taking 24 minutes. Such a sequence, they argue, is like constructing sentences, and they point out that damage to Broca's area in the brain results in impairment to both language and hand and arm gestures.40 Language is considered more fully in the next chapter. The period we have been covering, say 400,000-50,000 years ago, has been identified by Merlin Donald, professor of psychology at Queen's University in Toronto, as possibly the most momentous stage in history. Donald has identified four stages in the development of the modern mind, involving three transitions. The first mode he calls 'episodic' thinking, as is shown in the great apes. Their behaviour, he says, consists of short-term responses to the environment, their lives are lived 'entirely in the present', as a series of concrete episodes, with a memory for specific events in a specific context.41 The second form of thinking/behaving, typified by H. erectus , is 'mimetic'. For Donald, the world of H. erectus is qualitatively different from all that went before and this is what makes it so important. Erectus lived in a 'society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species' survival strategy'.42 Without language, Erectus nonetheless slowly developed a culture based on mimetics- intentional mime and imitation, facial expression, mimicry of sounds, gestures etc. This was a qualitative change, says Donald, because it allowed for intentionality, creativity, reference, co-ordination and, perhaps above all, pedagogy, the acculturation of the young. It was a momentous change also because minds/individuals were no longer isolated. 'Even highly sophisticated animals, such as apes, have no choice but to approach the world solipsistically because they cannot share ideas and thoughts in any detail. Each ape learns only what it learns for itself. Every generation starts afresh because the old die with their wisdom sealed forever in their brains...There are no shortcuts for an isolated mind.'43 Even so, mimesis was slow-it probably took Erectus half a million years to domesticate fire and three-quarters of a million to adapt to the cold.44 But Donald is in no doubt that many cultural artefacts had been produced by Erectus before language and the next transition, to 'mythic' thinking, which necessitates language. The shift to mimesis was the great divide in history, Donald says-it was, as he puts it, 'The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system.'45 The later transitions are considered below. The re-creation of the first ideas of early man, inferring his mental life from the meagre remains of crude stone tools and assorted remains, is itself an intellectual achievement of the first order by palaeontologists of our own day. The remains tell-or have been made to tell-a consistent story. At about 60,000-40,000 years ago, however, the agreement breaks down. According to one set of palaeontologists and archaeologists, at around this time we no longer need to rely on unpropitious lumps of stone and bone fragments to infer the behaviour of our ancient ancestors. In the space of a (relatively) short amount of time, we have a quite fantastic richness of material which together amply justify historian John Pfeiffer's characterisation of this period as a 'creative explosion'.46 In the other camp are the 'gradualists', who believe there was no real explosion at all but that man's intellectual abilities steadily expanded-as is confirmed, they say, by the evidence. The most striking artefact in this debate is the so-called Berekhat Ram figurine. During excavations at Berekhat Ram in Israel, in 1981, Naama Goren-Inbar, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found a small, yellowish-brown 'pebble' 3.5 centimetres long. The natural shape of the pebble is reminiscent of the female form but microscopic analysis by independent scholars has shown that the form of the figure has been enhanced by artificial grooves.47 The age of the pebble has been put at 233,000 BP but its status as an art object has been seriously questioned. It was the only such object found among 6,800 artefacts excavated at the site, and sceptical archaeologists say that all it represents is some 'doodling' by ancient man 'on a wet Wednesday'.48 The gradualists, on the other hand, put the Berekhat Ram figurine alongside the spears found at Schoningen (400,000 BP), a bone 'dagger' found at a riverside site in the Zemliki valley in Zaire, dated to 174,000-82,000 BP, some perforated and ochred Glycymeris shells found at Qafzeh in Israel (100,000 BP), some ostrich shell perforated beads found in the Loiyangalani river valley in