Main description:

What is it about human beings that makes us creative, able to imagine and enact new possibilities for life and new solutions to problems in a way that no other animal can? The authors included in The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind explore this question in essays and studies from a range of specializations and backgrounds. Experts on culture, art, and evolution come together to describe, analyze, and interpret the origins of artistic creativity and the anatomical and neurological structures that contribute to it. Essays focus on the origins of art in the Upper Palaeolithic as well as on manifestations of artistic creativity in preliterary societies and tribal cultures that have been preserved to the present day. The interdisciplinary approach to the topic accentuates the wide array of possible methodologies and interpretations of artistic manifestations in particular historic and cultural contexts.