Rough and tumble : aggression, hunting, and human evolution /

Pickering (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) has set a decisive course for this small volume, hoping to show that some two million years ago, a different style of hunting--ambush hunting--decoupled the users of this strategy from their primate ancestors. According to Pickering, this decoupling set the stage for all kinds of social dynamics that underpinned human evolution. Pickering's explanation for the change in strategy has to do with the small size of our hominin ancestors relative to the size of the prey they hunted. This is difficult to accept: if survival depended on a new strategy, humans would not be here because our ancestors could not have switched quickly enough. Most readers will quickly tire of the personal tone of the book, including long discussions of debates that Pickering has with colleagues in the field of paleoanthropology. The author does his best to keep references out of the text, offering instead a lengthy notes section that specialists will find attractive. The references-cited section will also appeal to professionals. The use of more and better illustrations would have added substantially to the book's usefulness. Not recommended for lay readers, but professionals and graduate students will find it of interest. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, professionals. M. J. O'Brien University of Missouri--Columbia

In the technical literature, it was paleontologist Raymond Dart who, in the 1940s, promoted the killer ape hypothesis-the idea that humans are a bloodthirsty species whose evolution was based on their propensity to hunt and kill. His contemporary Robert Ardrey popularized this view; now, decades later, Pickering, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and associate editor of the Journal of Human Evolution, takes on this proposition and demolishes it. Where Ardrey claimed that "man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon," Pickering asserts that the data require us to "disaggregate notions of aggression and hunting." Like most paleontologists, Pickering agrees that "hunting was a primary factor in our becoming fully human," but he goes on to explain that successful hunting by early humans could only occur when the aggression associated with killing was controlled by the intellect, thereby enabling individuals to work together and to distance themselves from direct and dangerous interaction with prey. Pickering provides an abbreviated but compelling history of the field, discussing dominant players as well as offering insights into how to interpret complex and fragmentary data. And while he's no Jared Diamond, Pickering is nevertheless a capable and accessible guide. 12 b&w photos, 1 table. Agent: Deirdre Mullane, Mullane Literary Associates. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.