>>12327638Consciousness is the sum total of iterative adaptations to dangers our ancestors faced. We can see rudimentary levels of sentience and even arguably sapience in the animal kingdom around us. What APPEARS to be the case is that there was a sort of cambrian explosion in conscious thought in pre-history. My personal assumption is that intelligence as we understand it arose very quickly once the conditions for it were met. In other words, I consider modern man’s sapience to have been not unlike an awakening at some key moment, rather than a truly progressive linear growth in cognitive capacity.
As far as I understand it, however, there is no clear indicator of when human consciousness truly arose, or whether it even arose in humans specifically and not its ancestors. We can make educted assumptions based on diet, tool-making, and physiology, but it’s purely conjecture at this time.
