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    Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big
    Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big
    Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big
    Ebook67 pages37 minutes

    Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big

    By Razie Mah

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    About this ebook

    Clive Gamble is a Paleolithic archaeologist. John Gowlett is a social anthropologist with primary interest in late European societies. Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist. Together, they submitted a proposal for research project commemorating the 100th anniversary of the British Academy. They were awarded the grant. Their book sums seven years of collaboration.
    The title is: Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind.
    One key idea frames the discussion. For primates, the neocortex to body volume ratio is correlated to community size. Thus, the community sizes of our ancestors may be determined from the mathematical equation, once the relative sizes of the brain and body are estimated from fossils.
    In the course of human evolution, the brain size of the hominins jumped twice. Otherwise, the brain size slowly increased. Our own species, the Neanderthal and the Devosinian ended up with the largest brain sizes. We also have the largest community sizes.
    The question is: What promoted (and constrained) the larger and larger community sizes?
    The answer always comes back to this: social life.
    These comments re-articulate Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar’s argument, using the category-based nested form along with a time-map for the evolution of talk, going from protolanguage, to hand talk to hand-speech talk, then finally, with the first singularity, to speech-alone talk.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRazie Mah
    Release dateJan 4, 2018
    ISBN9781942824398
    Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big
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      Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big - Razie Mah

      Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big

      By Razie Mah

      Published for Smashwords.com

      2018

      Notes on Text

      This essay comments on a 2014 book by an archeologist, a social anthropologist and an biological anthropologist. The title is Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. The publisher is Thames and Hudson (London, United Kingdom).

      This book sums up a seven-year research project commemorating the centennial of the British Academy.

      The principles are well-known and active researchers.

      For example, the biological anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, authored the 2016 book Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior (Oxford University Press).

      My goal is re-articulate this work using the category-based nested form as well as the hypothesis on the evolution of talk presented in The First Singularity.

      ‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

      Prerequisites: Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form (#1), Primer on Sensible and Social Construction (#2), and The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace.

      Table of Contents

      United in Victory

      Coming Together Takes Brains

      What Does Social Mean?

      An Intentional Interlude

      Social Comes To Term

      Start at the Beginning

      Three Crucial Skills

      Oldewan to Acheulean

      Fire and Cooking

      Ancestors with Brains over 1200cc

      Big Societies - Big Mistake

      United in Victory

      0001 Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind reports on a grand research project, financed by the British Academy on the occasion of its centennial.

      0002 The authors are notable. Clive Gamble is a Paleolithic archaeologist. John Gowlett is a social anthropologist with primary interest in late Paleolithic societies. Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist focusing on human and primate behaviors.

      0003 These comments re-articulate this work on the basis of three concepts. The first stance uses the category-based nested form. The second point of view appreciates the importance of triadic relations, particularly sign relations. The third idea is the hypothesis on the evolution of talk presented in The First Singularity. Our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

      0004 So, what is the British Academy?

      The British Academy is a national body for the humanities and social sciences. It is a bureaucracy. It is 100 years old. So, when it calls for submissions for a research project to celebrate itself, the institution intends to make itself look like the valuable asset that it is. They hold (taxpayer’s) money and are willing to spend it.

      0005 These authors submit the victorious proposal, a project titled Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain. This collaboration presents the state of the art. It is a winner, in more ways than one. Its postdoctoral fellows end up with jobs.

      Coming Together Takes Brains

      0006 A mathematical link exists between the volume of mammalian brains and the size of the species’ communities. This applies to our ancestors in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. The group size for humans should be around 150 individuals.

      0007 Of course, this does not apply to our current Lebenswelt. Today, a town of five thousand souls is considered small. 5,000 years ago, a town of the same

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