Review on the Merlin Donlad's Origin of Mind and Mind so Rare
Merlin Donald explained the stages of evolution of cognition with the sequence of three transitions. Humans progressed from other primates by developing gestural, linguistic, and written storage and thought structures, thereby developing what Donald calls "mimetic," "mythic," and "theoretic" culture to reconstruct the stages of human evolutionary cognitive development he collects the data from various sources i-e anthropology, archeology,cognitive psychology, neurobiology linguistics .through this he described the human brain cognition are differ from other primates. the primary cognition or cognition is known as “episodic”. According to Donald, early hominids possessed a chimpanzee-like brain that was brilliant at event-perception, capable of subtle social interactions, and sensitive to the significance of environmental events. He claims, however, that episodic recall was poor and environmentally driven rather than readily self-triggered at will. He describes this culture as 'episodic', with limited scope for the voluntary recall of events, for the rehearsal and purposive refinement of skills and the expression of knowledge. Donald's first biophysical and cognitive transition was a breakthrough in motor and mimetic skills, permitting the development of body language as a form of representation and communication. This change, he says, occurred around one and a half million years ago as Homo erectus appeared. The resulting mimetic culture was based on the new-found capability for self-triggered rehearsal and for voluntary representational acts that facilitated sociocultural development. Skilled tool-making, gesture, dance, mime and ritual became possible through embodied performance with the capacity for iconic representation leading to more abstract forms of symbolic but pre- linguistic representation. The second transition takes from mimetic culture to mythic culture. it resulted from the changes to human biological and cognitive structures