The first paper was presented at the "Past Minds" conference in Belfast. The original abstract was:

Historical work in cognitive science is confronted with a particularly vexing epistemological problem. It is that the past minds we wish to study are no longer around. All we have left is artifacts these minds have left behind. Leaving aside assumptions about what constitutes a "mind" and whether these artifacts might indeed be the very substance of minds, their existence does seem to force us to make certain assumptions about the contiguity of mental function in recent evolutionary history. But if, as Levinson and others have recently argued, it is plasticity (and the neuronal structures or "RAM" that make it possible) that is the "x-factor" in human cognition, this would seem to throw a significant wrinkle in evolutionary psychology's conclusions. In fact, the very format in which the present call for papers was formatted already leans towards one side because it presumes that "information processing functions" have been "essentially stable," a seemingly doubtful presumption from the perspective of broader evolutionary biology where adaptive processes are constantly in play. I would like to examine the two camps we have before us: evolutionary psychology vs. plasticity, Pinker vs. Fodor, Tooby/Cosmides vs. Buller and see what significance accepting, rejecting, or reconciling the two sides would have for historical science. In other words what assumptions are implicit in the two arguments and what inferences might we make on the basis of them? I plan, where possible, to incorporate data from my own field of specialty, ancient Israel/Palestine.

For the conference, I presented the bare bones of the data concerning the development from tokens to written symbols.