The Human Story: A new history of mankind鈥檚 evolution by Robin Dunbar, Faber & Faber, 拢12.99, ISBN 0571191339
ROBIN DUNBAR鈥檚 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 鈥渁ustralopithecine鈥� and 鈥淯pper Palaeolithic鈥� 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, 鈥渉igh鈥� culture and religion: a theory of mind that provides at least three 鈥渙rders of intentionality鈥�. That is, an ability to imagine what someone else is thinking about either your own or a third person鈥檚 beliefs. Really smart behaviour arises, Dunbar argues, when four, five or even six orders of intentionality can be achieved. He suggests that the orders of intentionality attained by our ancestors and relatives can be inferred from their brain volumes, so whereas the australopithecines barely surpassed the two orders of intentionality possibly managed by apes today, Homo erectus attains three orders and archaic H. sapiens, Neanderthals and modern humans pass the requisite threshold to enter into the worlds of art and religion. Neanderthal poets and priests? I don鈥檛 think so. Dunbar is also unsure and seeks an alternative explanation for their big brains.
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To Dunbar, there appears to be just one other key ingredient of the modern mind: frequent doses of endorphins 鈥� 鈥渢he brain鈥檚 own painkillers鈥� 鈥� that are self-administered every time we laugh, sing or engage in physical challenges, whether the scourging of religious ritual or marathon running. But the endorphin-thirsty big human brain has to have a body to support it and hence another theme in The Human Story concerns the conflicting demands of bipedal walking, which requires a narrow pelvis, and giving birth to potentially big-brained babies where a wide pelvis is the ideal. The evolutionary solution has been for human babies to be born long before they are properly ready for the world. This creates a whole host of further problems for evolution and culture to resolve, and for Dunbar to explain.
Much of this punchy and provocative book is about monkeys and apes, and the experiments that Dunbar and his students have conducted to understand the human mind. The archaeology is a little too sparse, and often too readily dismissed, for my own liking.
But this isn鈥檛 a book of facts and figures; it is one of ideas. Dunbar certainly delivers, whether it is about why we have religion, how evolving language went though a musical phase, or how we avoid having sex with people by making them laugh. And I am not going to be the one to tell you that that is a funny story.