WORK
The Roots of Thinking
Sheets-Johnstone's 1990 work tracing the evolutionary and developmental origins of cognition in bodily movement — the foundation on which her later arguments build.
The Roots of Thinking is Sheets-Johnstone's 1990 book developing the evolutionary and paleo-anthropological dimensions of her framework. Published nearly a decade before The Primacy of Movement, it established the argument that hominid cognitive capacities evolved from and remained grounded in bodily activity. Drawing on hominid paleoanthropology, primate studies, and linguistics, she traced how specifically human cognitive achievements — tool-making, counting, language, representational thinking — grew from kinesthetic roots that were present in human ancestors long before symbolic thought emerged. The book argued that the distinction between 'lower' bodily intelligence and 'higher' abstract thought is a philosophical inheritance without empirical foundation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book developed through close engagement with the paleoanthropological record, particularly the evidence of tool-making by early hominids. Sheets-Johnstone argued that tool-making is a kinesthetic achievement — that the capacity to modify a stone into a cutting edge requires not just conceptual planning but the bodily intelligence to coordinate hand, eye, force, and material response. This kinesthetic intelligence is