Lucy to Language

NOTE EDITORE

The concept of the social brain has become a popular topic in the last decade and has generated interest within the research community and contributed to a wide public examination of human culture, nature, mind, and instinct, as well as aspects of social and business organisation. At its core, the hypothesis that our social life drove the dramatic enlargement of our brain, bridges the dimensions of our evolutionary history and our contemporary experience. This has been the focus of a seven-year research project funded by the British Academy, the British Academy Centenary Research Project (otherwise known as the Lucy Project). The main aim of the Lucy Project has been to explore these two axes in an integrated set of studies whose focus was to link archaeology and, in its broadest sense, evolutionary psychology, which offers powerful, new explanatory insights. This approach redresses the past contribution from archaeology towards the study of evolutionary issues and ties evolutionary psychology into the extensive historical data from the past, allowing us to escape the confined timeframe of the comparatively recent human mind. In this volume of published and new papers, the contributors explore the question of just what it is that makes us so different, and why and when these uniquely human capacities evolved.

SOMMARIO

1 - Mind the Gap: or why we aren't just great apes2 - The social brain and the shape of the palaeolithic3 - The social brain hypothesis: an evolutionary perspective on the neurobiology of social behaviour4 - Hominin cognitive evolution: identifying patterns and processes in the fossil and archaeological record5 - The Identity Model: a theory to access visual display and hominin cognition within the Palaeolithic6 - The longest transition or multiple revolutions? Curves and steps in the record of human origins7 - Relationships and the social brain hypothesis: integrating evolutionary and psychological perspectives8 - Close social relationships: an evolutionary perspective9 - The brain opioid theory of social attachment: a review of the evidence10 - Time as an ecological constraint11 - Unravelling the evolutionary function of communities12 - Fireside chat: the impact of fire on hominin socioecology13 - Bridging the bonding gap: the transition from primates to humans14 - Evolution of primate social systems: implications for hominin social evolution15 - The road to modern humans: time budgets, fission-fusion sociality, kinship and the division of labour in hominin evolution16 - The costs of being a high latitude hominin17 - Communities on the edge of civilisation18 - The elements of design form in Acheulean bifaces: modes, modalities, rules and language19 - Why only humans have language20 - Social origins: sharing, exchange, kinship21 - Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of mind

AUTORE

Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His principal research interests focus on the evolution of sociality (with particular reference to primates and humans). He is best known for the social brain hypothesis, the gossip theory of language evolution, and Dunbar's Number (the limit on the number of relationships that we can manage). Clive Gamble is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. John Gowlett is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Liverpool.

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780199652594
• Dimensioni: 241 x 38.7 x 162 mm Ø 952 gr
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Illustration Notes: 59 in-text illustrations
• Pagine Arabe: 530