Early in their book A story of us, the evolutionary psychologists Leslie Newson and Peter Richerson remark of very early hominins that “we can't know what it is like to experience life with a brain so very different from our own” (p. 34). These words neatly encapsulate an unfortunate reality that confronts anyone who tries to understand or reconstruct the evolution of human cognition: we humans are so completely imprisoned within our own cognitive style as to be incapable of fully imagining what was going on in the minds of extinct hominins who were behaviourally highly sophisticated, but who nonetheless did not think like us—which basically includes all of them. The reason for this difficulty is that we modern Homo sapiens are entirely unique in the living world in the way in which we manipulate information about our exterior and internal worlds. We do this symbolically, which is to say that we deconstruct those worlds into vocabularies of mental symbols that we can then combine and recombine in our minds, according to rules, to make statements not only about the world as it is, but as it might be. And evidence in the archaeological record for the routinely symbolic behaviours that are our best proxies for the apprehension of the world in this fashion is at best very sparse indeed prior—and even for some time subsequent—to the initial appearance of Homo sapiens.