THE UNIFIED THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE: EXTRACTION, THE BLADE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF MIND

The Unified Theory of Human Nature introduces extraction as a multilevel cognitive operator that links perception, action, representation, symbolism, and culture. Rather than treating human cognition as a collection of isolated traits, the manuscript proposes a five‑level extraction architecture that explains how affordances are isolated, refined, stabilized, symbolized, and culturally transmitted across deep time. Drawing on archaeological, cognitive, developmental, and cultural evidence, the theory distinguishes extraction from related mechanisms such as abstraction, recursion, hierarchical planning, and predictive processing. It argues that extraction provides the structured substrate upon which these other processes operate. The manuscript maps each extraction level onto empirical signatures in the archaeological record, from Lomekwi and Oldowan reduction sequences (Level 2), to Acheulean ideal‑form stabilization (Level 3), to Middle Stone Age symbolic reduction (Level 4), culminating in the uniquely human coupling of Levels 3 and 4 that enables recursive extraction and cumulative culture. The work also integrates developmental evidence, showing how extraction emerges across infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and reframes childhood amnesia as a representational‑format shift rather than a failure of memory. At the cultural level, the theory explains how art, ritual, law, and institutions stabilize ideal forms across generations. Overall, this manuscript offers a mechanistic, falsifiable framework for understanding the emergence of symbolic cognition and human cultural evolution. It provides a unified account of how perception becomes representation, how representation becomes symbol, and how symbol becomes culture.