ISBN Thinking Big book Paperback 240 pages

How did the brains of our hominin ancestors first become human minds? When did our capacity for language and art, music and dance evolve? And why does this matter today?

This groundbreaking book contends that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances – the ability to ‘think big’ – that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. As Thinking Big shows, it seems we still inhabit social worlds that originated deep in our evolutionary past – by the fireside, on the hunt and across the grasslands of Africa.

About the Author
Clive Gamble is a British archaeologist and anthropologist, and Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University. He has been described as the 'UK’s foremost archaeologist investigating our earliest ancestors'.John Gowlett is Professor of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool University. He is involved in fieldwork in eastern and southern Africa.Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist specialised in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the 'cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships'.