Mind the Gap

Primate Behavior and Human Universals: Exploring the Gap.- Family & Social Organization.- The Deep Structure of Human Society: Primate Origins and Evolution.- Conflict and Bonding Between the Sexes.- The Unusual Women of Mpimbwe: Why Sex Differences in Humans are not Universal.- Politics & Power.- Dominance, Power, and Politics in Nonhuman and Human Primates.- Human Power and Prestige Systems.- The End of the Republic.- Intergroup Relationships.- Intergroup Aggression in Primates and Humans: The Case for a Unified Theory.- Why War? Motivations for Fighting in the Human State of Nature.- Foundations of Cooperation.- From Grooming to Giving Blood: The Origins of Human Altruism.- Evolved Irrationality? Equity and the Origins of Human Economic Behavior.- From Whence the Captains of Our Lives: Ultimate and Phylogenetic Perspectives on Emotions in Humans and Other Primates.- Language, Thought & Communication.- Primate Communication and Human Language: Continuities and Discontinuities.-Language, Lies and Lipstick: A Speculative Reconstruction of the African Middle Stone Age "Human Revolution".- Brain and Behaviour in Primate Evolution.- The Gap is Social: Human Shared Intentionality and Culture.- The Evolution and Development of Human Social Cognition.- Deceit and Self-Deception.- Human Universals and Primate Symplesiomorphies: Establishing the Lemur Baseline.- Innovation & Culture.- Ape Behavior and the Origins of Human Culture.- The Coevolution of Genes, Innovation, and Culture in Human Evolution.- Conclusions.- Mind the Gap: Cooperative Breeding and the Evolution of Our Unique Features.

From the reviews:

 "This edited, 22-chapter volume organizes contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines ... to address the origins and evolution of human universals--specifically, those behavioral and cognitive features that make humans a distinct species from other primates. ... In looking for evidence of both convergence and common descent in specific traits, as is common in comparative primatology, contributors make a very strong effort to evaluate the available evidence for evolutionary continuity in human social behavior. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty." (R. A. Delgado Jr., Choice, Vol. 47 (11), August, 2010)

"Mind the Gap, Tracing the Origins of Human Universals ... a collection of contributions dealing with the issue of human uniqueness from a multidisciplinary perspective. ... Mind the Gap brings together most of the 'hot' topics in primatology, along with interesting contributions from cultural anthropology, and, notably, draws our attention to two critical and frequently omitted aspects of comparative research, namely the importance of studying species that are evolutionarily distant from humans, and not only the great apes, and the need for more cross-cultural research." (Elsa Addessi, Metascience, Vol. 20, 2011)