A. V. Newton worked in the faculty of medicine at Liverpool University, mainly teaching dental students. To assist research into dental and facial pain, he joined the university’s neuroscience group and continued this interest post-retirement.
Dentistry and archaeology both have an interest in teeth and he became aware that archaeology had revealed much about our origin via anatomy and, more recently, genetics, but rather less about the primitive mind.
Exploring this field led to the idea of one scenario for our origin that also seemed to indicate how the major mental illnesses arose at the same time.
Most people are interested in their roots, often being highly gratified if their personal ancestry can be traced back to some notable historical character. Roots, however, go a lot further back than the written records about people and are implicated in the puzzle of our origin: why are we such symb...