The Human Story: A new history of mankind’s evolution by Robin Dunbar, Faber & Faber, £12.99, ISBN 0571191339
ROBIN DUNBAR’s new book about human evolution scarcely mentions fossils and stone tools. He concentrates instead on the mental attributes that have made us such a peculiar type of primate, being rightly confident that terms such as “australopithecine” and “Upper Palaeolithic” will already be familiar to his readers.
The Human Story is a relatively short book written with a strong conviction that one mental attribute above all lies behind our capacity for language, “high” culture and religion: a theory of mind that provides…
