Thinking Big

How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind

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From Stone Age networks to Digital Age networking, this book explores the ancient origins of our social lives today.

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From Stone Age networks to Digital Age networking, this book explores the ancient origins of our social lives today.
How did the brains of our hominin ancestors first become human minds? When did our capacity for language and art, music and dance evolve? And why does this matter today?

This groundbreaking book contends that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances – the ability to ‘think big’ – that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. As Thinking Big shows, it seems we still inhabit social worlds that originated deep in our evolutionary past – by the fireside, on the hunt and across the grasslands of Africa.
Extent: 240 pp
Format: paperback
Publication date: 2018-01-18
Size: 19.8 x 13.0 cm
ISBN: 9780500293829
Preface • 1. Psychology Meets Archaeology • 2. What It Means to Be Social • 3. Ancient Social Lives • 4. Ancestors With Small Brains • 5. Building the Human Niche: Three Crucial Skills • 6. Ancestors with Large Brains • 7. Living in Big Societies
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Press Reviews

An important, provocative essay on human evolution, argued with great eloquence and skill
Current Archaeology

A triumph of collaboration, as well as a gripping detective story
New Statesman

A dramatic demolition of the “stones and bones” approach to archaeology
New Scientist

Retains the Thames & Hudson tradition of thinking clearly, and writing well … You will not read a more important book this year
Minerva

About the Authors

Clive Gamble is a British archaeologist and anthropologist, and Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University. He has been described as the 'UK’s foremost archaeologist investigating our earliest ancestors'.

John Gowlett is Professor of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool University. He is involved in fieldwork in eastern and southern Africa.

Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist specialised in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the 'cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships'.

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