Joseph Carroll (Curators' Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis) lectures on “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts." Peter Kjaergaard will head seminar. Please see: "ttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v030/30.1carroll.html

Textbook versions of evolutionary psychology give a narrowed and simplified account of human cognitive evolution. Over the past few decades, research and theory from evolutionary anthropology and cognitive archaeology have provided a more complex and adequate account of human evolutionary history. Over the past 100,000 years, human life has undergone radical changes that have vastly expanded the flexibility of the human behavioral repertory. I argue that the oral antecedents of literature emerged as an adaptive solution to the problems of an ever-expanding range of cognitive and behavioral possibilities.