"......A number of studies suggest that the hippocampus continues to be crucial to our own power of foresight. Damage to the hippocampus can rob people of their foresight, for example, and when people with healthy brains think about their future, the hippocampus is part of the network that becomes active. We don't just picture walking through the forest. We travel forward into a social future as well, in which we can predict how people will react to things we do.
Scientists cannot say for sure exactly when our ancestors shifted to this more sophisticated kind of time travel. It is possible that the transition started in our primate ancestors, judging from some intriguing stories about our fellow apes. In the 1990s, for example, zookeepers in Sweden spied on a chimpanzee that kept flinging rocks at human visitors. They found that before the zoo opened each day, the chimp collected a pile of rocks, seemingly preparing ammunition for his attacks when the visitors arrived. Did the chimp see itself a few hours into the future and realize it would need a cache of artillery? The only way we could know for sure would be for the chimp to tell us.
The fact that chimpanzees can't explain themselves may itself be a clue to the nature of time travel. Full-blown language, which evolved only within the past few hundred thousand years, is one of the traits that make us humans different form other species. It is possible that once language evolved in our ancestors, it changed how we traveled through time. We could now tell ourselves stories about our lives and use that material to compose new stories about our future. Perhaps the literary imagination that gave rise to Dickens and Twain and Nabokov is, in fact, a time machine we keep in our head."
-Carl Zimmer in 'Discover Magazine' April 2011
http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/mental.aspx
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