Human Innovation and Primate SocialitiesHow Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies. By Dwight W. Read. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2011.

Abstract

In many ways, this book is about the social expansion of primate kinship in the human lineage: an evolution of imagined communities (a la Benedict Anderson) of human kinships emerging from the social webs common in our primate kin. Read argues that it is humans’ abilities to self-modify, to ratchet up new and multiple forms of envisioning social relations, that separates human societies from those of other primates. He invokes Levi-Strauss’s notion of “the advent of a new order” to identify the unique nature of the extent of human social processes: the cultural definition of kin and society. Read centers the role of shared cultural systems, cognitive complexity, and the “culturally constituted universe,” in narrating a broad understanding of how humans are in the world and how this differs from the “world-beings” of other primates. In making his case, Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/ social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us. He states, “Our societies are not based on genetically prescribed behaviors, but on our ability to build creatively on our genetic endowment in ways that are not predictable in simply by knowing what constitutes that endowment” (p. 12), and this is correct. However, it is worth noting that this can also be true of other organisms (and not just other primates), more so than Read gives them credit for. It is Read’s holding to a relatively simple model of evolutionary patterns and processes for other organisms and to