But the story is actually more complicated than that. For the earliest Homo sapiens who possessed all the anatomical attributes of our species—as far as can be told from their bony remains (see Fig. 2)—apparently behaved much as earlier hominids, exemplified by the Neanderthals, had done. The stone tool industries created by early anatomical Homo sapiens in the Levant, for example, are virtually indistinguishable from those bequeathed us in the same region by the Neanderthals, with whom they shared the Levantine environment in some way for upwards of 50,000 years. During this long period of coexistence or time-sharing, despite the morphological disparity between the two hominid species, there is no good reason to suspect any significant behavioral distinction between them.

Perhaps this may on the face of it seem surprising. For it is logical, and certainly convenient, to attribute a new capacity or way of doing business to the arrival of a new species. But a moment's thought should be enough to make it clear that any innovation, cognitive, technological, or whatever, has to arise within a species. Because, quite simply, there is no other place for it to do so. Any such innovation, after all, has to arise with an individual, who cannot differ too much from his or her own parents or offspring. It is possible, indeed likely, that the uniquely human symbolic capacity was based on a new anatomical potential which had lain fallow, so to speak, until it was somehow "discovered" by its possessors. And if so, Homo sapiens was following a pattern routinely exhibited in the history of life: that of "exaptation," the later exploitation in a new context of an acquisition originally made in another entirely. For example, birds were apparently using feathers to maintain their body temperatures for many millions of years before using them in the context of gliding and eventually for flight. Extraordinary as the product may have been, the mechanism by which it came about was entirely routine (Tattersall, 1998).