Re: Book suggestions about evolution of Mind/Hand?

S G J Assemblage (Assemblage@shef.ac.uk)
Thu, 15 Aug 1996 12:00:44 +0100

Hi Benjamin, I suggest the best starting point would be "Tools, Language
and Cognition in Human Evolution", Cambridge 1993. This is edited by
Kathleen Gibson and Tim Ingold, but therein you will find articles by
other authors who are important in this field such as McGrew,
Visalberghi, Wynn, Davidson and Noble and Toth and Schick.These papers
all have bibliographies citing other useful articles. Davidson and Noble
in particular are evolution-of-speech people and have many articles
pubished in CA and other organs, Toth and Schick are tool-making folks
and have a good book out ("Making Silent Stones Speak", Wiedenfield and
Nicholson 1993) as well as an article in Jnl Arch Science last year (or
possibly 1994) about teaching Kanzi to chip flint. You might also try
stuff by Philip Lieberman (zillions of articles in CA and others as well
as a book, "Uniquely Human: The evolution of speech, thought and selfless
behavior", Harvard UP 1993). His bibliography will refer you to stuff
about brains, cognition and psycholinguistics. About the evolution of
hand anatomy, well, that's not really my field, but you might start by
looking out for articles by Sussman about thumbs. Perhaps a good
evolutionary anatomy textbook (eg Aiello and Dean 1994, "Human
Evolutionary Anatomy", Blackie) or all-round human evolution source book
(eg Bilsborough 1992, "Human Evolution", Blackie) might have some useful
stuff and/or references.
My field is the behavioural areas of neanderthal studies. Let me know if
I can help any more. You've picked a really interesting topic, good luck
with it.
Jennie