Review of W. G. Runciman (ed.), The Origin of Human Social Institutions

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(4): 807-808 (2002).

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.

There never was a ‘human revolution’ – or rather, as Colin Renfrew (p. 96) puts it – the ‘true human revolution came only much later than the emergence of the species’. The first social institutions were property rights, marital contracts, and religions based on priesthoods and temples. We owe our humanity not to the establishment of ‘primitive communism’ as claimed by Marx – whose writings haunt this whole volume – but to the collapse of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and its replacement by the family, private property, and the state.

With the entry of modern humans into Europe, claims Renfrew (pp. 93-4), ‘nothing very much of interest happened’. Nothing? Anticipating charges of exaggeration here, Renfrew acknowledges certain Upper Palaeolithic innovations in tool-making and art. He insists, however (p. 94), that these ‘are not such as would greatly interest either untutored laymen….or the perceptive extraterrestrial observer casually visiting our planet’.

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RUNCIMAN, W. G. (ed.). The origin of human social institutions. 259 pp., maps, figs., tables, illus., bibliogrs. Oxford: Univ.Press, 200l. £29.50 (cloth)