This is an important and authoritative book, pioneering a new disciplinary field and in the process overturning much conventional wisdom. Some will view its conclusions as highly controversial, but the contributors are major and respected figures in their fields. The evolution of human life history is the published outcome of a seminar sponsored by the School of American Research in 2002. Unlike other multi-authored volumes of this kind, it is impressively coherent and tightly edited.

Why do humans co-operate? Social anthropologists do not usually ask this kind of question: we take co-operation for granted. But if anthropology is the study of what it means to be human, we should not be satisfied with this.

This book is probably best described as work in progress, documenting the emergence of a pioneer field. In 1994, Ruth Mace and Mark Pagel originally proposed that phylogenetic comparative methods were essential for testing co-evolutionary hypotheses in cultural and bio-cultural evolution. A decade later, this book represents the state of the art.

Despite its title, this volume is not concerned with how languages evolve. Its topic is a quite different question: the evolutionary emergence of language in our species. Debates in this area have been notoriously fractious, and this wide-ranging collection gives an accurate picture of the current interdisciplinary state of play.

This volume is a rich compendium of previously unpublished field reports from across Lowland South America. It consists of an excellent introduction, followed by twelve chapters in which a range of regional specialists debate and dispute the implications of their own and one another’s challenging and often-unexpected findings. Jargon free, tightly edited, and with a consistent focus, the book should interest not only Americanists but anyone concerned with kinship, gender, origins scenarios, sociobiology, or the history and evolution of the family. If you think you already know about such things – think again.

The ‘most stable and recurrent cultural patterns’, writes Atran in this readable and provocative book,‘are generated by specialized core adaptations of the human mind/brain’ (p. 170). Within evolutionary psychology, this is scarcely controversial – ‘stone age minds in a space age world’ is the fundamental idea. Where Atran differs from his colleagues is in attempting to glue this model to a very different one, in which social strategies, commitments, and institutions loom large. To explain religion, in Atran’s view, cognitive approaches will not suffice. Religion for Atran is more than a mass of internal representations f litting between brain and brain. Instead, he defines it as ‘costly communal commitments to hard-to-fake beliefs in the supernatural’ (p. 9).

Anthropology – particularly the American variety – has depended for its very existence on the concept of ‘culture’.Yet there is nowadays deep anxiety as to whether it means anything or remains usable at all. Biologists routinely include birds, bats, whales, and monkeys in ‘the culture club’. Social learning is certainly not unique to humans. Anthropologists, for their part, have notoriously failed to settle on a definition of ‘culture’. Is it ‘tradition’ or, on the contrary, ‘innovation’? Is it ‘that complex whole’ or, on the contrary, ‘a thing of shreds and patches’? Is it ‘ideas’ or, on the contrary, ‘social practice’?

Marshall Sahlins famously described Darwinism as ‘the origins myth of western capitalism’. From Stoczkowski’s book,we learn little about human origins, quite a lot about the myth. ‘Man’s ascent from savagery’ has gripped the popular imagination for well over a hundred years.The tale begins with scrawny, vulnerable cavemen cringing in cold and fear while sharp-fanged lions, bears, and hyenas stalk the landscape. At the mercy of the elements, our unfortunate forefathers are perpetually on the brink of starvation.

Chimpanzees are 98.44 per cent human, whereas daffodils are hardly human at all just 35 per cent. Harold Marks’s highly readable book is about the meaning of such authoritatively scientific facts. The style is chatty and informal, the chapters well organized, and the documentation and referencing very useful. The author is evidently in full scholarly command of his material.

This is an enormously rich book, summarizing and explaining just about every recent controversy in this burgeoning field. As if anticipating anthropologists’ misgivings about the whole enterprise, the authors begin by attacking the ‘over-enthusiastic application of evolutionary theory to humans in a way that seems to leave no room for cultural influences’. Thanks to language, they stress, humans have been able ‘to create and live in “virtual worlds”– worlds where intangible ideas and imaginary flights of fancy are as important and as meaningful as solid objects’ (p. 2). Culture – as Kenan Malik observes – is not a mere encrustation upon human nature, like dirt on a soiled shirt.Without culturally transmitted patterns of behaviour and belief, human nature would lack any vehicle of expression.

Was the evolution of Homo sapiens a purely gradual process? Or did it culminate in a relatively sudden transition to ‘mind’, ‘language,’ and ‘society’? This prestigious volume champions the second alternative - human consciousness was born in a revolution. Curiously, however, it dates the key transition to the period when ‘social complexity’ began arising among sedentary farmers.

This book claims to uncover the roots of homicide, war, and ‘terrorism’. Since the author is a well-known primatologist – described on the dust-jacket as ‘a protégé of Jane Goodall’– I expected a controversial but at least scholarly account. I was wrong.

This volume is a contribution to ‘evolutionary psychology’, according to which the mind is an organ shaped by past evolutionary pressures. Human mental architecture is conceptualized as modular– that is, composed of innately channelled, domain-specific, semiautonomous subsystems. Historically, the first claimed module was Noam Chomsky’s celebrated but still controversial ‘language faculty’. More recently, theorists have posited dedicated neural circuits for music, mind-reading, facerecognition, cheat-detection, technological competence, and much else.

This book is more than an academic treatise. As Keith Hart puts it in an impressive foreword (p. xiv), Rappaport is attempting ‘nothing less than to lay the groundwork for the development of a new religion adequate to the circumstances humanity will encounter in the twenty-first century’. Scientific detachment is a luxury we can no longer afford.

In this succinct, readable book, Lee Cronk seeks to reconcile contemporary behavioural ecology with cultural anthropology. He begins with E.B.Tylor’s classic definition of culture ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. Cronk deletes ‘habits’ from this list. He requires a concept which like the replicatory ‘selfishness’ central to the modern concept of a gene – explains behaviour while not forming part of it. Only culture defined as pure ideation can serve this function. Otherwise, behaviour is being explained by itself.

This book offers a superb review of recent debates on the origins of language, supported by an exhaustive and up-to-date bibliography. This in itself makes it a worthwhile buy. The scholarship is meticulous, displaying close familiarity with most central controversies in the field.

Arbib,
 Liebal,
 and
 Pika
 provide
 an
 excellent—and
 long
 overdue—
 comparative
 survey
 of
 the
 incidence
 of
 gestural
 versus
 vocal
 communication
 in
 nonhuman
 primates.
 I
 like
 their
 proposal
 that
 the
 primate
mirror
neuron
system
underpinning
gestural
imitation
played
a
 key
role
in
enabling
language
parity.
I
am
also
persuaded
by
their
more
 general
argument
that
the
emergence
of
vocal
speech
in
our
ancestors
 in
some
way
presupposed
the
scaffolding
provided
by
gesture
and
then
 pantomime.