Genes , Memes and Human History by Stephen Shennan London : Thames and Hudson , 2002 , Pp . 304 . KIM STERELNY

Perhaps the most critical problem facing the human sciences is that of integrating two conceptions of human activity. On the one hand, humans are evolved primates. And humans are encultured beings: intentional agents who are profoundly influenced by the particular cultures in which they are immersed. It has proved remarkably difficult to develop an account of human nature and of the broad patterns of human history that does justice to both these facts. The lingering nature/nurture problem is just one expression of this unresolved tension. Archaeology, of all the human sciences, can dodge this problem the least, and the great virtue of Shennan’s Genes, Memes and Human History is that he confronts it directly. For though humans are now both cultural and ecological beings, it was not always so. Once our hominid ancestors had a social organisation and a material culture roughly equivalent to that of today’s chimpanzees. Chimps are not encultured in the sense that we are encultured: their social life and their ecology does not depend on the accurate and extensive transmission of information from parents to offspring. It falls to archaeology to document and explain the transition from merely social hominids to encultured hominids. Archaeologists cannot escape our dual nature, for they must explain its coming into being. Thus for an evolutionary archaeologist like Shennan, the evolutionary facet of human nature and human history must be geneologically primary. For our enculturation is the product of a continuing evolutionary process grafted onto the top of a pre-existing set of ecological and social relations. Accordingly, Shennan begins by describing the toolkit that has been developed by those in the business of giving evolutionary explanations of human behaviour, identifying three basic approaches to human behavioural evolution. He briefly mentions evolutionary psychology: the project of developing evolutionary explanations of human cognition while also using evolutionary theory as a tool for generating hypotheses about our cognitive organisation. But his real interest is