In this paper, I will outline the essential steps in the story of hominin and human evolution. I will preface this with an account of the evidence of the changing cranial capacity of fossil hominins. This will serve to illustrate the key elements of evolutionary argument. I will then use this as a framework to discuss the contexts of the emergence of different important features in the story--the common ancestor of African apes (incuding humans), bipedalism, thermoregulation, tool-making, meat-eating, throwing, the control of the means of production of communicative utterances, colonisation of new environments, the production of symbols which are arbitrary but conventional and the use of language as a means of concealing information.

I will conclude the paper by beginning an analysis of the key elements of the Noble and Davidson argument and how these might be considered in the context of attempts to consider how human-like consciousness might be produced in machines.