Lucy to Language: The Benchmark Papers - Key Research on Human Evolution & Communication | Perfect for Anthropology Studies & Academic Research

Lucy to Language has been a massive research programme involving a large number of researchers from different disciplines working together over a number of years. And this heavyweight (and expensive) book contains more than twenty key chapters. This is not a popular science account of human evolution from pre-human Lucy to modern Homo sapiens. Each chapter is co-authored by two or three of the research collaborators, who have worked hard to produce a thoroughly argued and fully documented piece of work; each chapter is followed by several pages of scientific bibliography. The project was co-directed by three people, John Gowlett, Clive Gamble (both Palaeolithic archaeology specialists), and Robin Dunbar (psychologist and evolutionary scientist), and these three names appear as the editors of this set of papers. However, it is Robin Dunbar's name that comes up time and again throughout the book, often as one of the co-authors of many of the chapters. It is Dunbar's theories about the 'social brain', the evolution of language, and the relationship between evolving human cognition, evolving human cultural communication, and evolving human social group size that permeate and dominate the book. There is so much here that it is taking me at least a day to read a chapter, because I keep stopping to think, to take notes, or to track down one or other of the hundreds of references. This book, together with its predecessor (2010 Social Brain, Distributed Mind, which was a mid-project set of essays) will be quarried for its network of interesting and challenging ideas, and for its documentation of a great deal of front-line research, for years to come.One small point to watch: a number of the chapters in the book are re-prints of recent articles in learned journals. Anyone who has access to the academic journals in which they were first published may want to assess whether those chapters which are entirely new justify the price of the book.