AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 23:142–147 (2011)
Book Reviews Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Michael A. Little and Kenneth A.R. Kennedy. xii 1 259 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). 2010. $80.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper). The particularities of history play an instrumental, biological role in the evolution of life. In another sense, academic disciplines are also subject to the influence and constraining effects of historical particularities. As such, an examination of the disciplinary history of physical anthropology (itself concerned with human biological history) should produce an inherently reflective and insightful body of scholarship. This is indeed the case with Michael A. Little’s and Kenneth A.R. Kennedy’s (editors) Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century (hereafter referred to as Histories). Within the structure of 13 chapters, the editors along with an additional 11 distinguished contributors, present the interwoven histories of people, institutions, and topics vital to the emergence of modern physical anthropology, specifically with respect to the American tradition. Histories identifies the inextricable connections among physical anthropology’s key figures, influential institutions, and formative areas of research. Although the editors have assembled a diverse array of contributing scholars, the thematic and biographical convergence of their offerings emphasizes the overwhelming importance of a few critical entities. Specifically, various contributors to Histories collectively devote a majority of the book to the lives and scholarship of Franz Boas (1858–1942), Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka (1869–1943), and Earnest A. Hooton (1887–1954), including their respective roles in the formation of such disciplinary cornerstones as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA). With great historical consequence, these men, as well as their legacies in the form of students and scholarship, were primarily responsible for physical anthropology’s maturation amid the racially-charged politics of the 20th century. The historical significance of the study of human biological variation is exemplified in a contributed chapter by Jonathan Marks (Chapter 9) who posits that ‘‘physical anthropology was introduced in America as a rationalization for slavery’’ (p. 187). From such a compromised beginning in the 19th century, physical anthropology would require the intellectual and political leadership of Boas, Hrdlicˇka, and Hooten to: (1) refute the racial ‘‘science’’ being promulgated by (primarily) German physical anthropologists; and (2) salvage some semblance of the discipline’s authority on the study of race. On this score, Michael A. Little (Chapter 3) explores the direct contributions of Franz Boas, as well as the posthumous reanalysis of his extensive anthropometric databases. In doing so, Little demonstrates the power of physical anthropology (as exemplified by the scope and scale of Boas’ research efforts) to impact a major scientific and political debate of the early 20th century (i.e., the relative influences of heredity and the
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environment in structuring the character of human populations). Little’s insightful treatment of Boas’s multifaceted relationship to anthropology is representative of the success of the book as a whole, which demonstrates the inter-related trajectories of both scientific and social/political history. Heeding this lesson, the exigency of nesting the study of human biological diversity within the contemporary sociopolitical context (i.e., racial, imperial, and ethnocentric discourse) is equally relevant today as it was during the first half of the 20th century (Malone 2009). In addition to race, another fundamental focus of physical anthropology, and indeed Histories, is illuminating the course of human evolution. Several contributed chapters review the history and provenance of ideas influential to the study of human evolution (e.g., Brace, Chapter 2; Stini, Chapter 9). With particular aplomb, Stini succinctly summarizes the life and times of Sherwood Washburn, a leading figure of physical anthropology’s mid-century revolution. The biographical and professional details of Washburn’s early career, contextualized by the history of the preceding era, explicate the emergence of the ‘‘new physical anthropology.’’ Washburn and colleagues’ incorporation of ontogeny, functional anatomy, and behavior, in concert with an emphasis on biological systems, fostered contributions from a diverse array of scholars whose collective work is indelibly woven into the fabric of modern biological anthropology. More than just examining the past, Histories provides an historical lens from which to view contemporary trends in the discipline. Michael A. Little and Kenneth A.R. Kennedy convey, with no small irony, that the core of broadly trained physical anthropologists of the mid-20th century begat the hyper-specialized nature of today’s biological anthropologists. In other words, the successes of the former fostered the theoretical maturation and methodological advancements of the latter. Indeed, the community of biological anthropologists has expanded (e.g., the 2009 AAPA meeting had 1,650 attendees compared to 56 in 1963) and radiated into ‘‘as many specialties as there are people to specialize in them’’ (Rutherford 2010, p. 191). Arguably, this specialization increases the risk of isolation among the discipline’s practitioners and their respective (and often disparate) interests. As a counterweight, the value of Histories lies with its documentation of the discipline’s development of unifying principles and core research foci, thereby, conveying a guiding sense of continuity to a diversifying, dynamic field. LITERATURE CITED Malone N. 2009. The state of biological anthropology in 2008: is our discipline strong and our cause just? Am Anthropol 111:146–152. Rutherford J. 2010. Descent with modification: bioanthropological identities in 2009. Am Anthropol 112:191–199.
NICHOLAS MALONE Department of Anthropology University of Auckland New Zealand DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21117 Published online 15 November 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
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Human Brain Evolution: The Influence of Freshwater and Marine Food Resources. Edited by Stephen C. Cunnane and Kathlyn M. Stewart. xx 1 213 pp. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 2010. $129.95 (cloth). Fossil human skulls indicate that brain size increased roughly three-fold over the five-to-seven million year period since the human line emerged. Body size increased over the same interval, but to a much smaller degree, and the result is that living people are highly encephalized, meaning that they not only have large brains but also that their brains are far larger than we would expect from the relationship between body size and brain mass in other mammals, including other apes. Such extraordinary encephalization has obvious benefits, but it also has costs. Perhaps first and foremost, in modern humans, the brain accounts for only !2% of body weight, but it consumes roughly 20% of the body’s metabolic resources. In addition, its normal development and function require substantial quantities of specific nutrients, most notably iron, iodine, and two omega-3, long-chained, polyunsaturated fatty acids, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachnidonic acid. These nutrients are most abundant in the aquatic food chain and DHA in particular tends to be rare elsewhere. This could imply that human encephalization required a water-edge setting where people could feed frequently on fish, shellfish, or other aquatic species. The contributors to the present volume comprise nutritionists and neurochemists, who tend to promote the water-edge or aquatic hypothesis for human brain evolution, and anthropologists, who tend to be more noncommittal. Understandably given the theme of the book, no one offers a counterargument, but I present one here based on much of the same archaeological or paleoanthropological evidence that various contributors cite. Advocates of the aquatic hypothesis believe that it explains why many of the oldest known archaeological sites, assigned to the Oldowan and early Acheulean Cultural Traditions, formed on the margins of ancient east African lakes or rivers. It could also explain why the sites, most notably at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and Koobi Fora, Kenya, often contain bones of edible fish, particularly catfish (Clarias). Oldowan and early Acheulean people could have caught catfish by hand when the fish concentrated to spawn in shallow waters nearby. However, the lake and river margins on which the sites occurred were also places that early people must have frequented simply to drink, and perhaps even more important, they were the places where sedimentation was most likely to bury and preserve ancient sites. The sediments could have naturally incorporated dead fish, and only tool-marked bones would demonstrate human consumption of fish. Tool-marked bones demonstrate human feeding on mammals at most Oldowan and early Acheulean sites, but tool-marked fish bones are extremely rare, and so far, only Oldowan site FwJj20, Koobi Fora, dated to 1.95 Ma, has provided an unequivocally tool-marked catfish bone. Tool-marked fish bones may be scarce because stone tool butchery of fish generally left no marks, but the bottom line is still that neither site locations nor fish bones demonstrate an Oldowan and early Acheulean concentration on aquatic species. Site location is further unpersuasive, because some Oldowan or early Acheulean sites, such as the famous caves in the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg, South Africa, occur where people probably could not have met their DHA requirements
primarily from aquatic sources. Conceivably, their physiology allowed them to synthesize adequate amounts of DHA from chemical precursors in plants. More likely, they obtained most of what they needed fully formed in plants or in mammal flesh, brains, and marrow. In advance, the survival of historic foragers in similar regions implies that adequate terrestrial sources must exist. Apart from encephalization, in this book and elsewhere, advocates of the aquatic hypothesis also propose a link between the oldest known, humanly created shell middens, dated to as much 160–100 ka (thousands of years before present) in South African coastal caves, and the sporadic appearance of ‘‘modern’’ archaeological markers, especially putative art objects and ornaments, dated to 80–60 ka in the same caves or in others nearby. Almost everywhere else, especially in Europe, such advanced objects are usually said to postdate 50–40 ka. The connection between shellfishing and the initial flickering of modern behavior is questionable, however, because coastal caves with deposits older than 160 ka remain unknown, and shellfishing requires no special knowledge, technology, or personal risk. Nonhuman species, including for example, coastal baboons (Papio spp.), pursue it. Sea gulls (Larus spp.) even create shell accumulations that resemble human middens when they repeatedly drop fresh mussels and other bivalves on hard surfaces to fracture the shells. The sum suggests that when coastal archaeological deposits older than 160 ka are found, they will show that shellfishing began far too early to explain the development of ‘‘modern’’ behavior. Equally pertinent, no matter when people first collected shellfish, neural evolution appears to have occurred widely, not only where people could have exploited shellfish, but in the larger number of locales where they could not or did not. The principal modern or near-modern skull from Herto, Ethiopia, for example, dated to 160–154 ka, had an endocranial capacity of 1450 cc, which places it near the high end of the modern human range. Associated faunal remains include bones that suggest hunting or scavenging of large mammals on the margins of a lake, but nothing to indicate reliance on either shellfish or fish. Archaeological food refuse in fact implies that Africans and Europeans first intensively exploited fish only after 50–40 ka, although in both Europe and Africa, people were highly encephalized long before this. The relevant Europeans, the Neanderthals, also seem to have occasionally exhibited advanced (modern) behaviors rivaling those claimed for their South African contemporaries. Yet, isotopic analysis of remnant bone protein (collagen) suggests that the Neanderthals rarely if ever exploited aquatic foods, especially compared to their fully modern ‘‘Cro-Magnon’’ successors. In sum, I think that the fossil and archeological records fail to support the aquatic hypothesis for human brain evolution. This does not mean that the hypothesis can be ignored, and I especially recommend the present volume to readers like myself who need to become acquainted with the nutritional and neurochemical arguments in its favor. RICHARD G. KLEIN Program in Human Biology Stanford University Stanford, California DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21118 Published online 15 November 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
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The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy. By Bernd Heinrich. 337 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2010. $29.95 (cloth). Naturalists are a vanishing species. In the realms of the academic sciences, especially in the areas of what used to be called zoology, those practitioners of a holistic behavioral, evolutionary, analytical and naturalistic observation-oriented approaches are rapidly diminishing in number. There are very few remaining research-based biology departments where young students are taught to recognize and describe ecological and behavioral patterns of whole organisms and their niches. This is a devastating loss to the life sciences as so much of our basic knowledge about how and why animals do what they do comes from these endeavors. Nothing drives home the beauty of this perspective like reading a book that stands as homage to the glory of natural history. The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy, by Bernd Heinrich, is one of those books that are a joy to read because they put you front and center to watch and wonder at the amazingly complex and breathtaking lives of nonhuman animals (birds in this case). Bernd Heinrich, emeritus at the University of Vermont, has a long- and well-respected track record of research and publications on avian and insect ecology and behavior. He works between the laboratory and field, with an eye toward integrating physiological, evolutionary, and ecological explanations. Also, he is a well-known (and much medaled) long distance runner who has turned this passion into a peripheral research interest, participating in the discourse on the evolution of human locomotion and the role of long distance running. And, above all, he writes well. These previous paragraphs stand as a context with which to review this book. Written mostly as a discussion of broad evolutionary themes via a series of fascinating vignettes about bird behavior and ecology, The Nesting Season, walks us through the authors development as a bird watcher, scientist, and naturalist, overviews of monogamous and polygamous bird species, a wonderful deviation to focus on penguins, and sexual selection and leks before spending a third of the book on the nesting and parenting cycle in the context of the preceding chapters. The penultimate chapter takes us through some interesting variations in avian systems, such as cuckoldry via extra pair copulations (or EPCs), egg dumping, and variation in patterns of egg recognition. The chapter ends up with the brood parasites (Cuckoos and Cow birds) and an explanation for color coding of eggs and mouth colors in some bird species. The very short last chapter wraps up with a call for continued observation ‘‘generate more questions about courting, mating systems, brood parasitism, and parenting’’ (p 294). The strengths of this book are its well written and engaging style, the terrific narration of the author’s experiences watching birds, and the behaviors and scenarios he describes. Heinrich also brings a substantial evolutionary perspective to bear, weaving a variety of hypotheses into the description of behavior American Journal of Human Biology
and linking these descriptions to broader themes in the evolution of behavior and morphology. However, there are also a few elements of style and intent that gave me pause. Heinrich is no stranger to the anthropomorphism debate, nor does he quibble about where his beliefs fall. In my opinion, Heinrich is a bit too ready to see avian behavior as an evolutionary analogue for human behavior (and visa-versa). For example, his use of the term ‘‘love’’ when describing the physiology and intrapair behavior in certain birds species and the emotional states he attributes to those individual birds he raises, sets free, and watches for years, reflects a personal belief, but veers away from the quantifiable and, possibly, the evolutionarily relevant realm. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it enables him to reflect back on human behavior via the birds’ behavior, potentially coming to a series of conclusions that ignore many of the particular complexities of evolutionary histories, niche construction events, and contingency in human behavior. This is a pattern common to many researchers who of course are humans, but spend their research careers watching other species. The urge to link, directly, what we see as familiar in other species to what we see in our own via the cloak of evolutionary pressures and patterns is strong, but can lead down a fallacious path. Also, I would not have included the ‘‘invention of monogamy’’ in the subtitle, as this area is not really convincingly driven home in the book (and there is such abroad literature on this topic already). Rather, I think the real contribution of the book is not so much about specific mating or social systems, but rather the importance of understanding what variation is out there and how it might reflect different behavior, strategies, ecologies, and evolutionary histories. In spite of my personal discomfort with oversimplification of evolutionary pathways via anthropomorphism, I encourage readers of Human Biology to seriously consider purchasing and reading this book. It is a quick and enjoyable read that can open your eyes to some of the fascinating complexity in behavior and ecology of birds, and force you to always try to place your research and objectives (in the lab or the field) in a bit of context. The caring detail with which Heinrich describes numerous behavioral and ecological scenarios and the love and respect that he obviously has for certain individuals and species (geese and ravens come to mind here) remind us that identifying with, and bonding with, other species can be beneficial in some ways to our studies. Finally, this book reminds us to step back and remember that there is no substitute for actually watching what animals (including humans) do, before we try to explain why they are doing it.
AGUSTI´N FUENTES Department of Anthropology University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21119 Published online 7 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
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Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior. By Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson. xii 1 304 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2010. $29.95 (cloth). In 2009, Sarah Hrdy published a seminal book entitled, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origin of Mutual Understanding. According to Hrdy’s model, ‘‘mutual understanding,’’ one of the key characteristics that makes us human, arose, at least in part, as an outcome of our hominin ancestors increasingly adopting nonmaternal (alloparental) care. She specifically emphasizes female kin (‘‘allomothers’’) as the key cogs in this novel ‘‘shared care’’ system, while characterizing fathers as particularly facultative, unreliable caregivers. Hence, while they focus on nonmaternal caregivers with an altogether different purpose than Hrdy, Gray, and Anderson’s Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior is a timely publication that brings together a wide range of research on fathers, the expression of paternal care, and the impacts of paternal involvement. Indeed, for scholars interested in male reproductive ecology or parental investment, among other anthropological topics, Fatherhood would stand on the merits of its review of the existing scholarship on fatherhood. More notably, however, using an erudite, yet, conversational style, Gray and Anderson apply principles of evolutionary theory to this body of literature in a heretofore-missing compilation. In their introduction, Gray and Anderson include a subsection entitled ‘‘Data, Data, Data.’’ It is an apt characterization of the content of their book in the sense that they cover a broad array of subjects, nearly always using relevant citations from the scientific literature to bolster the argument at hand. The text is richly populated with study-to-study comparisons and references to scholarly sources, but the authors avoid overly abstruse writing and bring evolutionary principles to bear on interesting subject material, such as cross-cultural variation in fathering (Chapter 2), paternity certainty (Chapter 5), effects of father involvement on children (Chapter 6), paternal sexuality (Chapter 9), paternal psychobiology (Chapter 10), and fatherhood in relation to men’s health (Chapter 11). Without question, Fatherhood is highly informative, even for those familiar with other scholarly sources focused on fatherhood, such as the edited volumes by Lamb (The Role of the Father in Child Development) and Hewlett (Father– Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Contexts). In combination, these factors allow the authors to reach their outlined goal for the text to be ‘‘accessible and readable’’ with appeal to a broad (not singularly academic) audience. The book begins with an integrative chapter that highlights a variety of fundamental theoretical concepts with relevance to the rest of the text. This foundational section is an exemplar of the ways in which diverse lines of evidence coalesce throughout the book, as Gray and Anderson draw on cross-cultural, cross-species, and paleontological data to provide background on the advent of pairbonds and paternal investment in the course of hominin evolution. They thoroughly review the longstanding, ongoing debates regarding male–female cooperation in both childrearing and more broadly (sexual division of labor) in hominin evolution (e.g., Hawkes et al., 1997; Lancaster and Lancaster, 1983; Lovejoy, 2009). Although not necessarily representing an altogether novel review, this concise and up-to-date overview provides a conven-
ient refresher on or introduction to these important evolutionary and anthropological concepts. Indicated, at least in part, by the publication of this book, the paucity of anthropological studies focusing on fatherhood and, especially, paternal caregiving, has been slowly rectified over the last 2 decades. Still, the state of knowledge in this area is such that it is noteworthy that Fatherhood includes a socio-ecological analysis of men’s behavioral time allocation, comparing fathers and nonfathers, among six subsistence-level societies. Gray and Anderson use data from Human Relations Area Files to test the ways in which transitioning to fatherhood affects male investments in a variety of social and economic activities, using the results from these traditional societies to frame a broader discussion about trade-offs facing fathers across cultures and economic systems. Complementing its broad, evolutionary-oriented discussion of paternal behavior, Fatherhood also effectively integrates topics related to male reproductive biology. Although it comes on the heels of recent reviews of paternal socioendocrinology, such as Fernandez-Duque et al. (2009) and Gray and Campbell (2009), Gray and Anderson’s ‘‘Babies on His Brain’’ (Chapter 10) remains a useful and insightful exploration of the burgeoning literature on paternal endocrinology and neurobiology. The authors discuss new frontiers such as field-friendly biomarker research (e.g., on testosterone and prolactin), laboratory studies utilizing fMRI technology to map male brain activity under the influence of babies, and nonhuman primate research demonstrating changes in male brain structure induced by fatherhood. Altogether Gray and Anderson present a host of interesting studies that illustrate the unique ways in which humans and other species experience fatherhood under the skin and, even so, elucidate the extent to which researchers have only scratched the surface in these exciting new domains. In total, Gray and Anderson’s Fatherhood adds richly to the ways we think about infant care and human cooperation as being foremost to understanding aspects of human evolution. By examining patterns of contemporary pairbonding, fatherhood, and paternal investment within an evolutionary framework, it challenges us to rethink what factors, mechanisms, and ecologies might be better used to explain how and in what ways male and female hominin reproductive strategies became entwined to produce the most successful primate species of all. By unifying an extensive body of literature, previously dispersed across edited volumes, scientific articles, and otherwise, and collapsing these data into a highly accessible format, Gray and Anderson have made a significant contribution to the field of biological anthropology. Appealing to both scholars and nonscholars alike, this text represents a new ‘‘go-to’’ source for those wishing to learn about evolutionary, anthropological approaches to human and hominin fatherhood. For those of us who seek to teach the value of a truly integrative approach to these subjects, this book will undoubtedly prove to be a highly valuable commodity at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. LITERATURE CITED Fernandez-Duque E, Valeggia CR, Mendoza SP. 2009. The biology of paternal care in human and nonhuman primates. Annual Rev Anthropol 38:115–130. Gray PB, Campbell BC. 2009. Human male testosterone, pair bonding and fatherhood. In: Ellison PT, Gray PB, editors. Endocrinology of social relationships. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p 270–293.
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Hawkes K, O’Connell JF, Blurton Jones NG. 1997. Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmenopausal life spans. Curr Anthropol 38:551–77. Hewlett BS. 1992. Father-Child relations: cultural and biosocial contexts. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Hrdy SB. 2009. Mothers and others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Lamb ME. 2004. The role of the father in child development. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Lancaster JB, Lancaster CS. 1983. Parental investment: the hominid adaptation. In: Ortner DJ, editor. How humans adapt: a biocultural odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, p 33–66. Lovejoy CO. 2009. Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science 326(5949):74–748.
LEE T. GETTLER Laboratory for Human Biology Research Department of Anthropology Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21120 Published online 7 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology. Edited by Michael J. O’Brien and Stephen J. Shennan. xii 1 284 pp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2010. $40.00 (cloth). Innovation in cultural systems is an interesting concept for an edited volume. Many of the authors in this book are widely published in the field of evolutionary anthropology and archaeology but until this volume, had not argued that innovation (or invention) was an important component of evolutionary study. But innovation is not a new topic. Evolutionary ecologists have long recognized the importance of innovation in human behavioral adaptations. Evolutionary psychologists have fully recognized that the ability to innovate has a long developmental history; a history shared with some of our closest primate relations and thus plays a significant role in human evolution. More broadly, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists have fully elucidated the role of innovation in the organization of society for many decades, even before Leslie White published The Science of Culture in 1949. So why is this volume important and why did these editors create it? Simply said, for nearly 20 years, the scholars who have termed themselves evolutionary archaeologists patently denied anything but a limited role for innovation in the human evolutionary process. Although in the past their bias was limited to the term ‘‘intention,’’ this volume makes it clear that innovation and intention have intertwined meanings and result in much the same end products. Definitions here are important. In Chapter 2, Ariew states that, ‘‘I argue that innovations are appropriately explained by natural selection but that inventions are not’’ (p. 22). He later explains this difference with a question, asking ‘‘. . .what do the conditions for evolution by natural selection offer by way of explaining novelty (invention) and conditions for successful spread (innovation)’’ (p.24). Being the second chapter, and the most theoretical, I expected this chapter to set up the remainder of American Journal of Human Biology
the volume. But I could not find another chapter where this dichotomy is maintained. In fact, most of the chapters completely ignored these definitions using innovation and invention interchangeably, or used the term innovation for both invention and innovation. After decades of attempting to discredit the role of intention, it is no surprise that I could not find this term used in the book, but it was clear from many of the chapters that intention, innovation, and invention all had similar meanings to most of the authors. The book is organized into four sections: Introduction; The Biological Substrate; Cultural Inheritance; Patterns in the Anthropological Record. But the chapters in this book come from three rather different fields; at least they are different for those of us involved in these theoretical discussions. One group of chapters is by scholars who were at the forefront of developing the construct of Evolutionary Archaeology from the mid-1980s to about 2005, or at least have some legacy with scholars of that time (e.g., O’Brien and Shennan; Ariew; Mesoudi; Roux; VanPool; Savage). These scholars spend an extraordinary amount of time on terms and definitions, and make strong and pointed justifications as to the evolutionary rigor and relevance to their approach and their analyses. A second group of papers came to use evolutionary analyses because it was the best means by which to understand patterns in data. But it is also clear from their analyses that an evolutionary terminology is not necessary to the end product, but rather, is a means of getting to an end product. These papers approach innovation and invention from social process, economics, or other areas (e.g., Henrich; Bentley; Powell et al.; Kandler and Steele; Schiffer). The third group of papers is by biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, and others who have had a long history of studying innovation in human and nonhuman species and bring the critical background to this volume (e.g., Schwartz; Laland and Reader; Callebaut), or are placing traditionally nonanthropological approaches in the context of anthropological analyses (e.g., Larson; Palmer). There are several notable studies presented in this volume. Palmer, for example, presents an analysis of metatraditions and argues that these metatraditions maintain conservative cultural traits and provide a selective advantage for some societies to avoid innovation. That is, to maintain conservative technological traditions in the face of external pressures to change (or innovate). As examples, he uses the Amish of North America and Australian aborigines. While a novel approach, Palmer never once mentions the role of either a dominant state society in the protection of metatraditions (such as the Amish) or the political significance of maintaining traditions in the face of hegemonic expansion by societies that expect indigenous peoples to demonstrate traditional behaviors (Australia). Might the success of these metatraditions be more a product of the dominant state than any internal mechanism? On a rather different track, Bentley continues his 10year research effort in using complexity approaches to understand social behavior and culture change. Focusing here on how inventions/innovations spread through society, Bentley takes on knowledge systems as another example of the spread of fashions. While once again a stimulating discussion, I found his selection-fashion dichotomy inconsistent. For example, he uses name choice
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as an example of a neutral trait. While names might be neutral in some areas of the world, in other areas where names are copied from historical or religious luminaries, certain names may indeed have a selective advantage. This is the classic style versus function debate in archaeology, where again, one society’s neutral fashion or style might have a strong functional and selective advantage in another society. I do not believe traits must be neutral for either of these kinds of analyses, and that traits are fluid, perhaps even oscillating between neutrality and selection with changes in social systems. But that said, as usual, Bentley is at the cutting edge of these analyses, and is on the road to radically altering our understanding of social change. These brief examples aside, all of the chapters have something to offer and provide a foundation for examining innovation from a number of different perspectives. Overall, I found this book to be stimulating, interesting, and
thought provoking. It generated a suite of new ideas for my own analyses while providing a valuable contribution to the literature on the use of evolutionary analysis for understanding the structure, organization, and development of material traditions, social structures, and society. HERBERT D.G. MASCHNER Department of Anthropology Center for Archaeology, Materials, and Applied Spectroscopy Idaho Museum of Natural History Idaho State University Pocatello, Idaho DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21121 Published online 15 November 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
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