Thinking Big

By Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, Robin Dunbar

Book cover of Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind

Book description

When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language or art, music and dance evolve? It is the contention of this pathbreaking and provocative book that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Thinking Big as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Us humans are social animals par excellence, although if we scratch the surface there are evolutionary explanations for the simplest of things: why we laugh, dance, and gossip, and why humans across the world tend to have similar numbers of close friends and more distant relationships.

In Thinking Big two Palaeolithic archaeologists and an evolutionary anthropologist combine to present an explanation for how our behaviour evolved to cope with the increasing intellectual demands of growing group sizes, from small groups more characteristic of the apes to the huge, international networks that characterise the modern world.

The importance of what could…

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The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.

Each of the sections is written from…

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