Book Review
ROBIN DUNBAR, CLIVE GAMBLE & JOHN GOWLETT (ed.). Social brain, distributed mind. xxii+528 pages, 57 illustrations, 18 tables. 2010: Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press for The British Academy; 978-0-19-726452-2 hardback £60.
Review by April Nowell
Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
(Email: anowell@uvic.ca)
The social brain hypothesis (SBH) states that social complexity (i.e. establishing, maintaining and negotiating face to face as well as 'virtual' relationships among increasingly numerous and fragmented members of a community) drove hominin encephalisation. It is based on the observed relationship between brain size and degree of sociality in primates, seen most clearly in the strong correlation between community size and neocortex volume within this order including among extant humans (Gamble et al. 2011). The hypothesis is that this relationship held true for our hominin ancestors as well and can be explored using the archaeological record. That the social world is more challenging than the natural world is not a new idea and certainly much has been written about 'Machiavellian' intelligence and chimpanzee 'politics' over the past three decades and the applicability of these types of models to human evolution. But as a Palaeolithic archaeologist I found this collection to be timely because of its intersection with conversations occurring both within and outside Palaeolithic archaeology. I will mention two of these. First, for years archaeologists have discussed the social framework and communities of practice within which embodied learning and apprenticeship, craft production, and the creation of sites of social memory transpire. Most of this research has focused on archaeological communities younger than 40 000 BP (a somewhat arbitrary date now) but it may be possible to use the SBH as a vehicle for considering some of these practices on an evolutionary scale. Second, many researchers have noted pulses of 'modern behaviour' in the archaeological record of our ancestors — traits such as symbol use and technical innovation that appear and disappear without any directional trend or connection with later examples of such behaviour. The question has been whether this patterning should be explained within a cognitive or demographic/social/cultural framework. The SBH may be a way of bridging these approaches. Many of the elements of both of these conversations are brought together in the excellent chapter by Lawrence Barham.
There are twenty-two chapters in this densely packed volume and many of them deserve to be reviewed in their own right. Frequently I felt the need to chase down a cited reference or modify a lecture or paper in light of something I had read in one of these chapters. While there is great scope to this volume, one element I felt was missing was an explicit consideration of life history strategies and ontological development. In evaluating the social brain hypothesis and existence of a distributed mind, one needs to consider how the lengthening of childhood and the emergence of an adolescent phase in hominin evolution — and how the correlates of play, embodied learning or apprenticeship enhanced working memory and the like — affected the developing brain on both an ontological and evolutionary scale (Nowell 2010). The only reference to these issues is in the chapter by Finkel, Swartwout and Sosis in which the authors consider the relationship between religion and ontological development in extant humans.
One further drawback to this volume is that the editors assume a level of familiarity with the subject matter that will prove limiting to part of its potential audience. This could have been obviated through a more detailed introduction that defined terms and explained the varied approaches in the volume and through a contextualisation of the perspectives and contributions of each of the chapters' authors. A particularly effective way of doing this would have been to include short summaries before each of the book's five parts as Gibson and Ingold (1993) did in their now classic edited volume Tools, language and cognition in human evolution. Similarly, the present volume ends in a somewhat unsatisfactory way with one more individual contribution instead of a synthetic overview of the book as a whole. In the introduction, the editors argue that 'Given that social conformism exposes societies to free-riders, explaining the evolution of humans' unusual level of cooperativeness and willingness to abide by the communal will has become perhaps the single greatest challenge for the study of human evolution' (p. 5). It would be nice to know if by the end of our journey through this book the editors feel we are any closer to meeting this challenge. Nonetheless, there is much of value to this volume. Bottom line — who should read this book? Anyone with an interest in the evolution of cognition, sociality, materiality and technical practice who has already some familiarity with the subject matter.
References
- GAMBLE, C., J. GOWLETT & R. DUNBAR 2011. The social brain and the shape of the Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21: 115–35.
- GIBSON, K.R. & T. INGOLD (ed.). 1993. Tools, language and cognition in human evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- NOWELL, A. 2010. Working memory and the speed of life. Current Anthropology 51(S1): 121–33.
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