An infant progresses from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.

In any event, the cave painters left the first clear expressions of symbolic thought and a strong argument for speech as a recent development.

As Tomasello demonstrates, symbolic thought can operate only in a particular social environment:

Nevertheless, he argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other expressions of symbolic thought, such as language.

Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time.

Prime examples are the origin of life, the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, the emergence of eusociality or symbolic thought.

According to Johnston, the combination of emotions with symbolic thought produces meaning.

These object substitutions are theorized to play a role in the development of symbolic thought (Bodrova & Leong 2007).

It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate an ability to use complex symbolic thought and express cultural creativity.

This attenuation of money matches our growing capacity for symbolic thought and our confidence in our social institutions.