To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition -the social brain - in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches - the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares
perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular
focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool uses provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during the course of hominin evolution, increasingly large spatially distributed communities created stresses that threatened social
cohesion. This volume offers the possibility of new insights into the evolution of human cognition and social lives that will further our understanding of the relationship between
mind and world.
To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition -the social brain - in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches - the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares
perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular
focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool uses provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during the course of hominin evolution, increasingly large spatially distributed communities created stresses that threatened social
cohesion. This volume offers the possibility of new insights into the evolution of human cognition and social lives that will further our understanding of the relationship between
mind and world.
Framing the Issues: Evolution of the Social Brain
1: Robin Dunbar, Clive Gamble, and John Gowlett: The Social Brain
and its Distributed Mind
2: Clive Gamble: Technologies of Separation and the Evolution of
Social Extension
3: Yonas Beyene: Herto Brains and Minds: Behaviour of Early Homo
Sapiens from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia
The Nature of Network: Bonds of Sociality
4: Julia Lehmann, Katherine Andrews, and Robin Dunbar: Social
Complexity and the Importance of Indirect Relationships: Social
Networks in Primates
5: Robert Layton and Sean O'Hara: Fission-Fusion Behaviour in
Chimpanzees and Hunter-Gatherers
6: Sam Roberts: Constraints on Social Networks
7: Anna Wallette: Social Networks and Community in the Viking
Age
Evolving Bonds of Sociality
8: Robin Dunbar: Deacon's Dilemma: the Problem of Pairbonding in
Human Evolution
9: Julie Hui and Terrence Deacon: The Evolution of Altruism via
Social Addiction
10: Dwight Read: From Experiential-Based to Relational-Based forms
of Social Organization: a Major Transition in the Evolution of Homo
Sapiens
11: Carl Knappett: Networks and the Evolution of Socio-Material
Differentiation
The Reach of the Brain: Modern Humans and Distributed Minds
12: Alan Barnard: When Individuals Do Not Stop at the Skin
13: Holly Arrow: Cliques, Coalitions, Comrades, and Colleagues:
Sources of Cohesion in Groups
14: Richard Sosis: Evolutionary Signalling Theory and Religion:
Recent Advances and Future Directions
15: Paul Connerton: Some Functions of Collective Forgetting
16: Mark Rowlands: Consciousness and Culture
Testing the Past: Archaeology and the Social Brain in Past
Action
17: John Gowlett: Firing up the Intellect
18: Lawrence Barham: Multi-Tasking and the Social Brain in Middle
Pleistocene Africa
19: Matt Grove: The Archaeology of Group Size
20: John Chapman: Fragmenting Hominins and the Presencing of Early
Palaeolithic Social Worlds
21: Fiona Coward: Small Worlds, Material Culture and Ancient Near
Eastern Social Networks
22: Steve Mithen: Brain, Mind and Material Culture in Evolutionary
Perspective
Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Clive Gamble is Professor of Geography at the Royal Holloway, University of London and Fellow of the British Academy.
John Gowlett is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool.
There is much of value to this volume.
*April Nowell, Antiquity.*
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