book review: histories of american physical anthropology in the twentieth century

Book Reviews

Histories of American Physical Anthropology in theTwentieth Century. Edited by Michael A. Little andKenneth 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 anothersense, academic disciplines are also subject to theinfluence and constraining effects of historical particu-larities. As such, an examination of the disciplinaryhistory of physical anthropology (itself concerned withhuman biological history) should produce an inherentlyreflective and insightful body of scholarship. This isindeed the case with Michael A. Little’s and KennethA.R. Kennedy’s (editors) Histories of American Physi-cal Anthropology in the Twentieth Century (hereafterreferred to as Histories). Within the structure of 13chapters, the editors along with an additional 11 dis-tinguished contributors, present the interwoven histor-ies of people, institutions, and topics vital to the emer-gence of modern physical anthropology, specificallywith respect to the American tradition.

Histories identifies the inextricable connectionsamong physical anthropology’s key figures, influentialinstitutions, and formative areas of research. Althoughthe editors have assembled a diverse array of contribut-ing scholars, the thematic and biographical convergenceof their offerings emphasizes the overwhelming impor-tance of a few critical entities. Specifically, various con-tributors to Histories collectively devote a majority ofthe book to the lives and scholarship of Franz Boas(1858–1942), Ales Hrdlicka (1869–1943), and Earnest A.Hooton (1887–1954), including their respective roles inthe formation of such disciplinary cornerstones as theAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) andthe American Association of Physical Anthropologists(AAPA). With great historical consequence, these men,as well as their legacies in the form of students andscholarship, were primarily responsible for physicalanthropology’s maturation amid the racially-chargedpolitics of the 20th century.

The historical significance of the study of human bio-logical variation is exemplified in a contributed chapterby Jonathan Marks (Chapter 9) who posits that ‘‘physi-cal anthropology was introduced in America as a ration-alization for slavery’’ (p. 187). From such a compro-mised beginning in the 19th century, physical anthro-pology would require the intellectual and politicalleadership of Boas, Hrdlicka, and Hooten to: (1) refutethe racial ‘‘science’’ being promulgated by (primarily)German physical anthropologists; and (2) salvage somesemblance of the discipline’s authority on the study ofrace. On this score, Michael A. Little (Chapter 3)explores the direct contributions of Franz Boas, as wellas the posthumous reanalysis of his extensive anthropo-metric databases. In doing so, Little demonstrates thepower of physical anthropology (as exemplified by thescope and scale of Boas’ research efforts) to impact amajor scientific and political debate of the early 20thcentury (i.e., the relative influences of heredity and the

environment in structuring the character of humanpopulations). Little’s insightful treatment of Boas’s mul-tifaceted relationship to anthropology is representativeof the success of the book as a whole, which demon-strates the inter-related trajectories of both scientificand social/political history. Heeding this lesson, the exi-gency of nesting the study of human biological diversitywithin the contemporary sociopolitical context (i.e.,racial, imperial, and ethnocentric discourse) is equallyrelevant today as it was during the first half of the20th century (Malone 2009).

In addition to race, another fundamental focus ofphysical anthropology, and indeed Histories, is illumi-nating the course of human evolution. Several contrib-uted chapters review the history and provenance ofideas influential to the study of human evolution (e.g.,Brace, Chapter 2; Stini, Chapter 9). With particularaplomb, Stini succinctly summarizes the life and timesof Sherwood Washburn, a leading figure of physicalanthropology’s mid-century revolution. The biographicaland professional details of Washburn’s early career, con-textualized by the history of the preceding era, expli-cate the emergence of the ‘‘new physical anthropology.’’Washburn and colleagues’ incorporation of ontogeny,functional anatomy, and behavior, in concert with anemphasis on biological systems, fostered contributionsfrom a diverse array of scholars whose collective workis indelibly woven into the fabric of modern biologicalanthropology.

More than just examining the past, Histories pro-vides an historical lens from which to view contempo-rary trends in the discipline. Michael A. Little andKenneth A.R. Kennedy convey, with no small irony,that the core of broadly trained physical anthropologistsof the mid-20th century begat the hyper-specialized na-ture of today’s biological anthropologists. In otherwords, the successes of the former fostered the theoreti-cal maturation and methodological advancements of thelatter. Indeed, the community of biological anthropolo-gists has expanded (e.g., the 2009 AAPA meeting had1,650 attendees compared to 56 in 1963) and radiatedinto ‘‘as many specialties as there are people to special-ize in them’’ (Rutherford 2010, p. 191). Arguably, thisspecialization increases the risk of isolation among thediscipline’s practitioners and their respective (and oftendisparate) interests. As a counterweight, the value ofHistories lies with its documentation of the discipline’sdevelopment of unifying principles and core researchfoci, thereby, conveying a guiding sense of continuity toa diversifying, dynamic field.

LITERATURE CITED

Malone N. 2009. The state of biological anthropology in 2008: is our disci-pline strong and our cause just? Am Anthropol 111:146–152.

Rutherford J. 2010. Descent with modification: bioanthropological identi-ties in 2009. Am Anthropol 112:191–199.

NICHOLAS MALONE

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of AucklandNew Zealand

DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21117Published online 15 November 2010 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com).

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 23:142–147 (2011)

VVC 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Human Brain Evolution: The Influence of Freshwaterand 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 increasedroughly three-fold over the five-to-seven million year periodsince the human line emerged. Body size increased over thesame interval, but to a much smaller degree, and the resultis that living people are highly encephalized, meaning thatthey not only have large brains but also that their brainsare far larger than we would expect from the relationshipbetween body size and brain mass in other mammals,including other apes. Such extraordinary encephalizationhas obvious benefits, but it also has costs. Perhaps first andforemost, in modern humans, the brain accounts for only�2% of body weight, but it consumes roughly 20% of thebody’s metabolic resources. In addition, its normal develop-ment and function require substantial quantities of specificnutrients, most notably iron, iodine, and two omega-3,long-chained, polyunsaturated fatty acids, docosahexaenoicacid (DHA) and arachnidonic acid. These nutrients aremost abundant in the aquatic food chain and DHA in par-ticular tends to be rare elsewhere. This could imply thathuman encephalization required a water-edge settingwhere people could feed frequently on fish, shellfish, orother aquatic species. The contributors to the present vol-ume comprise nutritionists and neurochemists, who tend topromote the water-edge or aquatic hypothesis for humanbrain evolution, and anthropologists, who tend to be morenoncommittal. Understandably given the theme of thebook, no one offers a counterargument, but I present onehere based on much of the same archaeological or paleoan-thropological evidence that various contributors cite.

Advocates of the aquatic hypothesis believe that itexplains why many of the oldest known archaeologicalsites, assigned to the Oldowan and early AcheuleanCultural Traditions, formed on the margins of ancienteast African lakes or rivers. It could also explain why thesites, most notably at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and KoobiFora, Kenya, often contain bones of edible fish, particu-larly catfish (Clarias). Oldowan and early Acheuleanpeople could have caught catfish by hand when the fishconcentrated to spawn in shallow waters nearby.However, the lake and river margins on which the sitesoccurred were also places that early people must have fre-quented simply to drink, and perhaps even more impor-tant, they were the places where sedimentation was mostlikely to bury and preserve ancient sites. The sedimentscould have naturally incorporated dead fish, and onlytool-marked bones would demonstrate human consump-tion of fish. Tool-marked bones demonstrate human feed-ing on mammals at most Oldowan and early Acheuleansites, but tool-marked fish bones are extremely rare, andso far, only Oldowan site FwJj20, Koobi Fora, dated to1.95 Ma, has provided an unequivocally tool-marked cat-fish bone. Tool-marked fish bones may be scarce becausestone tool butchery of fish generally left no marks, but thebottom line is still that neither site locations nor fishbones demonstrate an Oldowan and early Acheulean con-centration on aquatic species. Site location is furtherunpersuasive, because some Oldowan or early Acheuleansites, such as the famous caves in the Cradle of Human-kind near Johannesburg, South Africa, occur where peo-ple probably could not have met their DHA requirements

primarily from aquatic sources. Conceivably, their physi-ology allowed them to synthesize adequate amounts ofDHA from chemical precursors in plants. More likely, theyobtained most of what they needed fully formed in plantsor in mammal flesh, brains, and marrow. In advance, thesurvival of historic foragers in similar regions implies thatadequate terrestrial sources must exist.

Apart from encephalization, in this book and elsewhere,advocates of the aquatic hypothesis also propose a linkbetween the oldest known, humanly created shell mid-dens, dated to as much 160–100 ka (thousands of yearsbefore present) in South African coastal caves, and thesporadic appearance of ‘‘modern’’ archaeological markers,especially putative art objects and ornaments, dated to80–60 ka in the same caves or in others nearby. Almosteverywhere else, especially in Europe, such advancedobjects are usually said to postdate 50–40 ka. The connec-tion between shellfishing and the initial flickering of mod-ern behavior is questionable, however, because coastalcaves with deposits older than 160 ka remain unknown,and shellfishing requires no special knowledge, technol-ogy, or personal risk. Nonhuman species, including forexample, coastal baboons (Papio spp.), pursue it. Sea gulls(Larus spp.) even create shell accumulations that resem-ble human middens when they repeatedly drop fresh mus-sels and other bivalves on hard surfaces to fracture theshells. The sum suggests that when coastal archaeologicaldeposits older than 160 ka are found, they will show thatshellfishing began far too early to explain the develop-ment of ‘‘modern’’ behavior.

Equally pertinent, no matter when people first collectedshellfish, neural evolution appears to have occurredwidely, not only where people could have exploited shell-fish, but in the larger number of locales where they couldnot or did not. The principal modern or near-modern skullfrom Herto, Ethiopia, for example, dated to 160–154 ka,had an endocranial capacity of 1450 cc, which places itnear the high end of the modern human range. Associatedfaunal remains include bones that suggest hunting orscavenging 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 Africansand Europeans first intensively exploited fish only after50–40 ka, although in both Europe and Africa, peoplewere highly encephalized long before this. The relevantEuropeans, the Neanderthals, also seem to have occasion-ally exhibited advanced (modern) behaviors rivaling thoseclaimed for their South African contemporaries. Yet,isotopic analysis of remnant bone protein (collagen) sug-gests that the Neanderthals rarely if ever exploitedaquatic foods, especially compared to their fully modern‘‘Cro-Magnon’’ successors.

In sum, I think that the fossil and archeological recordsfail to support the aquatic hypothesis for human brainevolution. This does not mean that the hypothesis can beignored, and I especially recommend the present volumeto readers like myself who need to become acquaintedwith the nutritional and neurochemical arguments inits favor.

RICHARD G. KLEIN

Program in Human BiologyStanford UniversityStanford, California



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American Journal of Human Biology

The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and theInvention of Monogamy. By Bernd Heinrich. 337pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.2010. $29.95 (cloth).

Naturalists are a vanishing species. In the realmsof the academic sciences, especially in the areas ofwhat used to be called zoology, those practitioners ofa holistic behavioral, evolutionary, analytical and nat-uralistic observation-oriented approaches are rapidlydiminishing in number. There are very few remainingresearch-based biology departments where young stu-dents are taught to recognize and describe ecologicaland behavioral patterns of whole organisms and theirniches. This is a devastating loss to the life sciencesas so much of our basic knowledge about how andwhy animals do what they do comes from theseendeavors. Nothing drives home the beauty of thisperspective like reading a book that stands as homageto 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 ajoy to read because they put you front and center towatch and wonder at the amazingly complex andbreathtaking lives of nonhuman animals (birds in thiscase).

Bernd Heinrich, emeritus at the University of Ver-mont, has a long- and well-respected track record ofresearch and publications on avian and insect ecologyand behavior. He works between the laboratory and field,with an eye toward integrating physiological, evolution-ary, and ecological explanations. Also, he is a well-known(and much medaled) long distance runner who hasturned this passion into a peripheral research interest,participating in the discourse on the evolution of humanlocomotion and the role of long distance running. And, aboveall, he writes well.

These previous paragraphs stand as a context withwhich to review this book. Written mostly as a discus-sion of broad evolutionary themes via a series of fas-cinating vignettes about bird behavior and ecology,The Nesting Season, walks us through the authors de-velopment as a bird watcher, scientist, and naturalist,overviews of monogamous and polygamous bird spe-cies, a wonderful deviation to focus on penguins, andsexual selection and leks before spending a third ofthe book on the nesting and parenting cycle in thecontext of the preceding chapters. The penultimatechapter takes us through some interesting variationsin avian systems, such as cuckoldry via extra paircopulations (or EPCs), egg dumping, and variation inpatterns of egg recognition. The chapter ends up withthe brood parasites (Cuckoos and Cow birds) and anexplanation for color coding of eggs and mouth colorsin some bird species. The very short last chapterwraps up with a call for continued observation ‘‘gen-erate more questions about courting, mating systems,brood parasitism, and parenting’’ (p 294).

The strengths of this book are its well written andengaging style, the terrific narration of the author’sexperiences watching birds, and the behaviors andscenarios he describes. Heinrich also brings a sub-stantial evolutionary perspective to bear, weaving avariety of hypotheses into the description of behavior

and linking these descriptions to broader themes inthe evolution of behavior and morphology. However,there are also a few elements of style and intent thatgave me pause. Heinrich is no stranger to the anthro-pomorphism debate, nor does he quibble about wherehis beliefs fall.

In my opinion, Heinrich is a bit too ready to seeavian behavior as an evolutionary analogue for humanbehavior (and visa-versa). For example, his use of theterm ‘‘love’’ when describing the physiology and intra-pair behavior in certain birds species and the emo-tional states he attributes to those individual birds heraises, sets free, and watches for years, reflects a per-sonal belief, but veers away from the quantifiable and,possibly, the evolutionarily relevant realm. This is notnecessarily a bad thing, except that it enables him toreflect back on human behavior via the birds’ behavior,potentially coming to a series of conclusions thatignore many of the particular complexities of evolu-tionary histories, niche construction events, and contin-gency in human behavior. This is a pattern common tomany researchers who of course are humans, butspend their research careers watching other species.The urge to link, directly, what we see as familiar inother species to what we see in our own via the cloakof evolutionary pressures and patterns is strong, butcan lead down a fallacious path. Also, I would nothave included the ‘‘invention of monogamy’’ in the sub-title, as this area is not really convincingly drivenhome in the book (and there is such abroad literatureon this topic already). Rather, I think the real contri-bution of the book is not so much about specific mat-ing or social systems, but rather the importance ofunderstanding what variation is out there and how itmight reflect different behavior, strategies, ecologies,and evolutionary histories.

In spite of my personal discomfort with oversimpli-fication of evolutionary pathways via anthropomor-phism, I encourage readers of Human Biology to seri-ously consider purchasing and reading this book. It isa quick and enjoyable read that can open your eyesto some of the fascinating complexity in behavior andecology of birds, and force you to always try to placeyour research and objectives (in the lab or the field)in a bit of context. The caring detail with whichHeinrich describes numerous behavioral and ecologicalscenarios and the love and respect that he obviouslyhas for certain individuals and species (geese and rav-ens come to mind here) remind us that identifyingwith, and bonding with, other species can be benefi-cial in some ways to our studies. Finally, this bookreminds us to step back and remember that there isno substitute for actually watching what animals(including humans) do, before we try to explain whythey are doing it.

AGUSTIN FUENTES

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Notre DameNotre Dame, Indiana

DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21119Published online 7 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library


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Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior.By Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson. xii 1304 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 MutualUnderstanding. According to Hrdy’s model, ‘‘mutualunderstanding,’’ one of the key characteristics that makesus human, arose, at least in part, as an outcome of ourhominin 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 facul-tative, unreliable caregivers. Hence, while they focus onnonmaternal caregivers with an altogether different pur-pose than Hrdy, Gray, and Anderson’s Fatherhood: Evolu-tion and Human Paternal Behavior is a timely publicationthat brings together a wide range of research on fathers,the expression of paternal care, and the impacts of pater-nal involvement. Indeed, for scholars interested in malereproductive ecology or parental investment, among otheranthropological topics, Fatherhood would stand on themerits of its review of the existing scholarship on father-hood. More notably, however, using an erudite, yet, con-versational style, Gray and Anderson apply principles ofevolutionary theory to this body of literature in a hereto-fore-missing compilation.

In their introduction, Gray and Anderson include a sub-section entitled ‘‘Data, Data, Data.’’ It is an apt characteri-zation of the content of their book in the sense that theycover a broad array of subjects, nearly always using rele-vant citations from the scientific literature to bolster theargument at hand. The text is richly populated withstudy-to-study comparisons and references to scholarlysources, but the authors avoid overly abstruse writing andbring evolutionary principles to bear on interesting sub-ject material, such as cross-cultural variation in fathering(Chapter 2), paternity certainty (Chapter 5), effects offather involvement on children (Chapter 6), paternal sex-uality (Chapter 9), paternal psychobiology (Chapter 10),and fatherhood in relation to men’s health (Chapter 11).Without question, Fatherhood is highly informative, evenfor those familiar with other scholarly sources focused onfatherhood, such as the edited volumes by Lamb (The Roleof the Father in Child Development) and Hewlett (Father–Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Contexts). In com-bination, these factors allow the authors to reach theiroutlined 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 high-lights a variety of fundamental theoretical concepts withrelevance to the rest of the text. This foundational sectionis an exemplar of the ways in which diverse lines ofevidence coalesce throughout the book, as Gray andAnderson draw on cross-cultural, cross-species, and pale-ontological data to provide background on the advent ofpairbonds and paternal investment in the course of homi-nin evolution. They thoroughly review the longstanding,ongoing debates regarding male–female cooperation inboth childrearing and more broadly (sexual division oflabor) in hominin evolution (e.g., Hawkes et al., 1997;Lancaster and Lancaster, 1983; Lovejoy, 2009). Althoughnot necessarily representing an altogether novel review,this concise and up-to-date overview provides a conven-

ient refresher on or introduction to these important evolu-tionary and anthropological concepts.

Indicated, at least in part, by the publication of thisbook, the paucity of anthropological studies focusing onfatherhood and, especially, paternal caregiving, has beenslowly rectified over the last 2 decades. Still, the state ofknowledge in this area is such that it is noteworthy thatFatherhood includes a socio-ecological analysis of men’sbehavioral time allocation, comparing fathers and nonfa-thers, among six subsistence-level societies. Gray andAnderson use data from Human Relations Area Files totest the ways in which transitioning to fatherhood affectsmale investments in a variety of social and economic activ-ities, using the results from these traditional societies toframe a broader discussion about trade-offs facing fathersacross cultures and economic systems.

Complementing its broad, evolutionary-oriented discus-sion of paternal behavior, Fatherhood also effectively inte-grates topics related to male reproductive biology. Althoughit comes on the heels of recent reviews of paternal socioen-docrinology, such as Fernandez-Duque et al. (2009) andGray and Campbell (2009), Gray and Anderson’s ‘‘Babieson His Brain’’ (Chapter 10) remains a useful and insightfulexploration of the burgeoning literature on paternal endo-crinology and neurobiology. The authors discuss new fron-tiers such as field-friendly biomarker research (e.g., ontestosterone and prolactin), laboratory studies utilizingfMRI technology to map male brain activity under theinfluence of babies, and nonhuman primate research dem-onstrating changes in male brain structure induced byfatherhood. Altogether Gray and Anderson present a hostof interesting studies that illustrate the unique ways inwhich humans and other species experience fatherhoodunder the skin and, even so, elucidate the extent to whichresearchers have only scratched the surface in these excit-ing new domains.

In total, Gray and Anderson’s Fatherhood adds richly tothe ways we think about infant care and human coopera-tion as being foremost to understanding aspects of humanevolution. By examining patterns of contemporary pair-bonding, fatherhood, and paternal investment within anevolutionary framework, it challenges us to rethink whatfactors, mechanisms, and ecologies might be better usedto explain how and in what ways male and female homi-nin reproductive strategies became entwined to producethe most successful primate species of all. By unifying anextensive body of literature, previously dispersed acrossedited volumes, scientific articles, and otherwise, andcollapsing these data into a highly accessible format, Grayand Anderson have made a significant contribution to thefield of biological anthropology. Appealing to both scholarsand nonscholars alike, this text represents a new ‘‘go-to’’source for those wishing to learn about evolutionary,anthropological approaches to human and hominin father-hood. For those of us who seek to teach the value of a trulyintegrative approach to these subjects, this book willundoubtedly prove to be a highly valuable commodity atboth the graduate and undergraduate levels.

LITERATURE CITED

Fernandez-Duque E, Valeggia CR, Mendoza SP. 2009. The biology of pater-nal care in human and nonhuman primates. Annual Rev Anthropol38:115–130.

Gray PB, Campbell BC. 2009. Human male testosterone, pair bonding andfatherhood. In: Ellison PT, Gray PB, editors. Endocrinology of socialrelationships. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p 270–293.

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Hawkes K, O’Connell JF, Blurton Jones NG. 1997. Hadza women’s timeallocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmeno-pausal 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 mutualunderstanding. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress.

Lamb ME. 2004. The role of the father in child development. Hoboken,N.J.: Wiley.

Lancaster JB, Lancaster CS. 1983. Parental investment: the hominid ad-aptation. In: Ortner DJ, editor. How humans adapt: a biocultural odys-sey. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, p 33–66.

Lovejoy CO. 2009. Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecusramidus. Science 326(5949):74–748.

LEE T. GETTLER

Laboratory for Human Biology ResearchDepartment of AnthropologyNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, Illinois

DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21120Published online 7 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library


Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions fromEvolutionary 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 conceptfor an edited volume. Many of the authors in this book arewidely published in the field of evolutionary anthropologyand archaeology but until this volume, had not arguedthat innovation (or invention) was an important compo-nent of evolutionary study. But innovation is not a newtopic. Evolutionary ecologists have long recognized the im-portance of innovation in human behavioral adaptations.Evolutionary psychologists have fully recognized that theability to innovate has a long developmental history; a his-tory shared with some of our closest primate relations andthus plays a significant role in human evolution. Morebroadly, anthropologists, economists, and sociologistshave fully elucidated the role of innovation in the organi-zation of society for many decades, even before LeslieWhite published The Science of Culture in 1949. So why isthis volume important and why did these editors create it?Simply said, for nearly 20 years, the scholars who havetermed themselves evolutionary archaeologists patentlydenied anything but a limited role for innovation in thehuman evolutionary process. Although in the past theirbias was limited to the term ‘‘intention,’’ this volumemakes it clear that innovation and intention have inter-twined meanings and result in much the same endproducts.

Definitions here are important. In Chapter 2, Ariewstates that, ‘‘I argue that innovations are appropriatelyexplained by natural selection but that inventions arenot’’ (p. 22). He later explains this difference with a ques-tion, asking ‘‘. . .what do the conditions for evolution bynatural selection offer by way of explaining novelty(invention) and conditions for successful spread (innova-tion)’’ (p.24). Being the second chapter, and the most theo-retical, I expected this chapter to set up the remainder of

the volume. But I could not find another chapter wherethis dichotomy is maintained. In fact, most of the chapterscompletely ignored these definitions using innovation andinvention interchangeably, or used the term innovationfor both invention and innovation. After decades ofattempting to discredit the role of intention, it is no sur-prise that I could not find this term used in the book, butit was clear from many of the chapters that intention,innovation, and invention all had similar meanings tomost of the authors.

The book is organized into four sections: Introduction;The Biological Substrate; Cultural Inheritance; Patternsin the Anthropological Record. But the chapters in thisbook come from three rather different fields; at leastthey are different for those of us involved in these theo-retical discussions. One group of chapters is by scholarswho were at the forefront of developing the construct ofEvolutionary Archaeology from the mid-1980s to about2005, or at least have some legacy with scholars of thattime (e.g., O’Brien and Shennan; Ariew; Mesoudi; Roux;VanPool; Savage). These scholars spend an extraordi-nary amount of time on terms and definitions, and makestrong and pointed justifications as to the evolutionaryrigor and relevance to their approach and their analy-ses. A second group of papers came to use evolutionaryanalyses because it was the best means by which tounderstand patterns in data. But it is also clear fromtheir analyses that an evolutionary terminology is notnecessary to the end product, but rather, is a means ofgetting to an end product. These papers approach inno-vation and invention from social process, economics, orother areas (e.g., Henrich; Bentley; Powell et al.; Kan-dler and Steele; Schiffer). The third group of papers isby biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, and others whohave had a long history of studying innovation inhuman and nonhuman species and bring the criticalbackground to this volume (e.g., Schwartz; Laland andReader; Callebaut), or are placing traditionally nonan-thropological approaches in the context of anthropologi-cal analyses (e.g., Larson; Palmer).

There are several notable studies presented in this vol-ume. Palmer, for example, presents an analysis of meta-traditions and argues that these metatraditions maintainconservative cultural traits and provide a selectiveadvantage for some societies to avoid innovation. That is,to maintain conservative technological traditions in theface of external pressures to change (or innovate). Asexamples, he uses the Amish of North America and Aus-tralian aborigines. While a novel approach, Palmer neveronce mentions the role of either a dominant state societyin the protection of metatraditions (such as the Amish) orthe political significance of maintaining traditions in theface of hegemonic expansion by societies that expect indig-enous peoples to demonstrate traditional behaviors(Australia). Might the success of these metatraditions bemore a product of the dominant state than any internalmechanism?

On a rather different track, Bentley continues his 10-year research effort in using complexity approaches tounderstand social behavior and culture change. Focusinghere on how inventions/innovations spread through soci-ety, Bentley takes on knowledge systems as anotherexample of the spread of fashions. While once again astimulating discussion, I found his selection-fashion di-chotomy inconsistent. For example, he uses name choice

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as an example of a neutral trait. While names might beneutral in some areas of the world, in other areas wherenames are copied from historical or religious luminaries,certain names may indeed have a selective advantage.This is the classic style versus function debate inarchaeology, where again, one society’s neutral fashionor style might have a strong functional and selectiveadvantage in another society. I do not believe traitsmust be neutral for either of these kinds of analyses,and that traits are fluid, perhaps even oscillatingbetween neutrality and selection with changes in socialsystems. But that said, as usual, Bentley is at the cut-ting edge of these analyses, and is on the road to radi-cally altering our understanding of social change.

These brief examples aside, all of the chapters havesomething to offer and provide a foundation for examininginnovation from a number of different perspectives. Over-all, I found this book to be stimulating, interesting, and

thought provoking. It generated a suite of new ideas formy own analyses while providing a valuable contributionto the literature on the use of evolutionary analysis forunderstanding the structure, organization, and develop-ment of material traditions, social structures, and society.

HERBERT D.G. MASCHNER

Department of AnthropologyCenter for Archaeology, Materials,and Applied SpectroscopyIdaho Museum of Natural HistoryIdaho State UniversityPocatello, Idaho



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book review: histories of american physical anthropology in the twentieth century

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