0192 Chapter one presents the shared intentionality hypothesis.

The early hominins cannot say, “We work for food.”

Yet, that is what they do.

0193 So how is it, that today, Tomasello can inscribe, “Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.”?

What a great sentence!

Er… question?

0194 Tomasello notes that answers to this question may be thrown into one of two bins.  The first bin is labeled “culture”.  The second bin is labeled “social coordination”.  If an inquirer wants to upset an evolutionary anthropologist, use these terms interchangeably.

Notably, there is another bin, concealed by his proposed theoretical construction, way back in 1999.  That bin is labeled “triadic relations”.

0195 To make the concealment even more provocative, Tomasello’s project has already been diagrammed in an examination of that 1999 book.  Here is a picture of the resulting three-level interscope, with the headline hypothesis_2astanding in for joint attention_2a.

0196 What is concealed?

I call it “Tomasello-Mah synthesis”.

The following figure corresponds to the Darwinian paradigm, applied to the evolution of the hominins.

0197 The Darwinian paradigm appears in Razie Mah’s The Human Niche, as well as Comments on Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Book (2017) Adam and the Genome.  Both are available for sale at smashwords and other e-book venues.

This particular expression of the Darwinian paradigm synthesizes the insights of Tomasello and Mah.

0198 Note how the situation level of the Darwinian paradigm corresponds to the content level of Tomasello’s vision.  If Tomasello’s vision is a house, then the content-level of the Tomasello-Mah synthesis dwells in the basement.

In 1999, Tomasello identifies joint attention_2a as a key adaptation.  Other adaptations build on this foundation.  Joint attention_2a associates to hominin behavior.  In theory, if an evolutionary anthropologist could time-travel back to the Pliocene, he could observe (and perhaps measure) occasions of joint attention_2a, especially when the australopithecines and early Homo are working for food in teams.

In 2014, Tomasello identifies shared intentionality_2a as a key adaptation.  Shared intentionality_2a refers to the cognitive mechanisms underlying joint attention_2a.  Food is not the shared intentionality in the slogan, “We work for food.”  Working together is.