Harvey Whitehouse Inheritance

Homo sapiens is the unnatural ape. For countless millennia, evolution has shaped our behaviour. And for countless millennia, that behaviour has reshaped the world: building sprawling cities, global faiths, nation states. Nature made humanity, and humanity remade nature. Here, one of the world's leading anthropologists reveals how our evolutionary past informed the birth and rise of global civilisation. Unveiling a visionary new way of studying human history - one that stunningly weaves together experimental psychology, anthropology and quantitative social science - Harvey Whitehouse uncovers the three evolutionary biases that explain our social behaviour: conformism, religiosity and tribalism. And he reveals how these biases underpinned the greatest revolutions in human history, from the transition to agriculture to the rise of the first bureaucracies and organised religions. Above all, he argues that only by understanding our natural past can we hope to survive the challenges of our unnatural present - from violent criminality to environmental meltdown. The result is a landmark study of the past and future of the world we made. It transforms our understanding of who we are and who we can be.