Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind

A closer look at social history and the growth of the human brain

When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language, art, music and dance evolve? This pathbreaking book proposes that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups over greater distances—the ability to “think big”—that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. This social brain hypothesis, put forward ...