Early Human Development Quotes

There has always been in history some people who think in the Stone Age.

The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

Anaximander says that men were first produced in fishes, and when they were grown up and able to help themselves were thrown up, and so lived upon the land.

The prehistorical and primitive period represents the true infancy of the mind.

A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.

Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.

It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver.

Pre-history tells us that our species used to be a hunter-gatherer society. This means that the job of raising a family was split 50-50 between the men and the women - the man's 50 percent share was to sit in the woods with a sharp stick, waiting for something to hunt to wander by, and the woman's 50 percent was to do everything else.

I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.