The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution. Kim Sterelny. 2021. Oxford University Press, New York. xi + 182 pp. $74.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-19-753138-9

Sterelny is a philosopher of biology, but his book could be cast as a thorough evaluation of human evolution by a social psychologist with a deep interest in primatology: the actual labels do not matter very much, because the study of human evolution is so interdisciplinary, and its students must of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American Antiquity 2024, Vol.89 (3), p.539-541
Main Author: Gowlett, John A. J.
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology
Cooperation
Cultural change
Egalitarianism
Evolution
Human evolution
Human nature
Philosophers
Primates
Review
Violence
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Summary:Sterelny is a philosopher of biology, but his book could be cast as a thorough evaluation of human evolution by a social psychologist with a deep interest in primatology: the actual labels do not matter very much, because the study of human evolution is so interdisciplinary, and its students must often make their own expertise. Sterelny is more comfortable with ideas set out by Robert Layton and Sean O'Hara, who postulate increased hominin hunting as encouraging cooperation, than those of Richard Wrangham and colleagues, who use interpretations of chimp models of closed groups and violence to help interpret human violence. Ian Tattersall gives a bare-bones overview, a physical anthropology with behavioral insights (but no fraction of the social analysis provided by Sterelny) in his book Understanding Human Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
ISSN:0002-7316
2325-5064
DOI:10.1017/aaq.2024.18