Monica L. Smith

On her book A Prehistory of Ordinary People

Cover Interview of January 30, 2011

In a nutshell

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about many things at once.

Over a million years ago, our first tool-using ancestors learned to manage their time to address many different types of needs simultaneously, from gathering raw material and fighting off predators to investing in sophisticated communication in the form of language and gestures.

The skills exhibited by our earliest multitasking ancestors eventually made it possible for humans to adapt to many different conditions as they migrated throughout the world. Many cultures subsequently developed elaborate rituals, increased their resource base through the domestication of plants and animals, and gathered together for the construction of monuments.

We have inherited those talents today—that is how we can live in cities and multitask our way through our daily lives.

But multitasking isn’t just about doing many things at once. It’s also the cognitive ability to put down a piece of work and then pick it up again where you left off.

During the interval of not working on something, however, you may have acquired new information that affects how you complete the task. Our species evolved to be uniquely capable of interacting with the world through multiple stops and starts while interweaving new information and techniques for creative purposes.

Looking at the way in which humans have interacted with food, goods, and work over the long span of the past million years, we see how the incremental accumulation of many individuals’ thoughts and activities provided the foundation for larger and larger social groups. Leaders were people who added onto the daily multitasking of individuals, getting their followers to put a little extra work onto their daily routines in order to create monuments and civic architecture.

everyday existence / anthropology / psychology / evolution / management / archaeology / multitasking /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009