Human Origins

Camilla Power is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. Her research has focused on the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture, language, art and religion.

“As a biological anthropologist, I welcomed the opportunity to read this book, and found it to be thoughtful and relevant to my work and interests. I will certainly encourage my colleagues to read it.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)“…makes a substantial contribution to what Alan Barnard in his afterword refers to as ‘a new configuration of anthropological ideas,’ a ‘larger’ and more comprehensive anthropology. The volume's two major goals are to reengage social anthropology with research on human origins and, in so doing, to apply insights from sociocultural studies to evolutionary interpretations of symbolic culture, sociality, and cultural variation.” • Choice“This work provides an important link between social anthropology and evolutionary anthropology, developing a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding human origins.” • Dimitri Bondarenko, The Russian Academy of Sciences

• IntroductionCamilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary CallanChapter 1. Forty Years On: Biosocial Anthropology RevisitedHilary CallanChapter 2. Rethinking the Relationship between Studies of Ethnobiological Knowledge and the Evolution of Human Cultural CognitionRoy EllenChapter 3. Toward a Theory of EverythingChris Knight and Jerome LewisChapter 4. Sexual Insult and Female MilitancyShirley G. ArdenerChapter 5. Who Sees the Elephant?  Sexual Egalitarianism in Social Anthropology's RoomMorna FinneganChapter 6. From Metaphor to Symbols and Grammar: The Cumulative Cultural Evolution of LanguageAndrew D. M. Smith and Stefan HoeflerChapter 7. Reconstructing a Source Cosmology for African Hunter-gatherersCamilla PowerChapter 8. Sounds in the Night: Ritual Bells, Therianthropes, and Eland Relations among the HadzaThea SkaanesChapter 9. Human Physiology, San Shamanic Healing and the ‘Cognitive Revolution’Chris LowChapter 10. Rain Serpents in Northern Australia and Southern Africa: a Common Ancestry?Ian WattsChapter 11. Bedouin Matrilineality RevisitedSuzanne E. JosephChapter 12. ‘From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain’ An Open Invitation for Social Anthropology to Join the Evolutionary DebateWendy JamesAfterwordAlan BarnardBibliographyIndex