Well, it's not just wild speculation: it's based on his interpretation of ancient literature and archaelogy. Since the hypothesis is fundamentally about the sub

Well, it's not just wild speculation: it's based on his interpretation of ancient literature and archaelogy. Since the hypothesis is fundamentally about the subjective experience of (illiterate and long dead) people, it's naturally hard to verify or disprove. But to me, Jaynes's theory seems to shine a lot of light on certain phenomena: the prevalence of statuettes in tombs; the injunctive tone and form of common schizophrenic hallucinations; specific artworks like the Homeric poems, the Bible, and the altar of Tukulti-Ninurta I; and so on. Daniel Dennett wrote an article about the book, in which he states that he "takes it very seriously": http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arch... A quote from that review that I think portrays the book quite fairly: "Now, when Julian Jaynes tells his story he doesn’t say that it is a just-so story. He doesn’t say it is just a sort of guess at how it might have been. He claims to be telling the historical truth as best as he can figure it out. But he is also clever enough to realize that if he doesn’t have the details just right, then some other story which is in very important respects rather like it must be true. So the whole account is put together by a rather interesting amalgam of aprioristic thinking about how it had to be, historical sleuthing, and inspired guesswork. He uses aprioristic reasoning to establish that we have to have travelled from point A to point B by some route—where and when the twists come is an interesting empirical question. He flavors and deepens and constrains his aprioristic thinking about how it had to be with whatever he can find about how it was and he lets his imagination go as fertile as he can and clutches at whatever straws he can find in the 'fossil record.'"