The idea of the cognitive revolution is conveniently Eurocentric. It locates modern-day France and Germany as the site of the metamorphosis of human behavior and identifies the first Homo sapiens capable of symbolic thought as those who left Africa and then turned left when they reached the Levant. This isn’t surprising. The discoveries of Lascaux in 1940, Chauvet in 1994 and the Venus of Hohle Fels in 2008, as well as the reconstruction of the Löwenmensch in the 1980s, dazzled several generations of scholars who grew up believing that “white” people originating in Europe were inherently
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