BOOK REVIEWS / Physical Anthropology 239

Leap did happen wholly within a mere 10,000 years, shiftingfrom prehuman to human artifacts, it moved at the speed of cul-ture, not biology... . If so, the mind's biological evolution waslargely accomplished, and the baton passed to society" (p. 377).

For those of us interested in the biological basis of human be-havior, it is the passing of the baton that is of greatest interest. Inexploring this issue, Jolly relies sporadically on RichardDawkins's concept of the meme—"gene like elements of ourmental system" (p. 62). If we agree that ideas share qualitieswith genes, that they mutate and reproduce, we may expect cul-tural evolution to operate by the same mechanisms as organicevolution. The difference, according to Jolly, is that learningmakes cultural evolution more efficient: "Sex sloughs off errorsby shuffling genes. Learning far more quickly inserts correc-tions to behavior. Instead of wastage of eggs and embryos thathappen to inherit many bad mutations, our minds simply jettisonbad ideas" (p. 65; emphasis added).

If only it were that simple. The reality is that learning may alsofacilitate the spread of bad ideas. Elsewhere Jolly acknowledgesthis fact when she notes that "many cultures throughout theworld dictate that a mother should express and discard the colos-trum [the antibody rich fluid produced by the mother just afterbirth] because it looks like inferior milk." Jolly contends that "itis amazing that such an unhealthy belief is so widespread" (p.329). To my mind, Jolly's example undermines her own argu-ment. Learning doesn't make cultural evolution more efficient,it just makes it faster. Moreover, it is unclear whether or not themechanisms by which societies and populations evolve are at allanalogous.

Regardless of the mechanisms by which cultures change,Jolly ably demonstrates that it makes no sense to view humanbehavior as being shaped by culture alone. Some behaviors canbe unequivocally assigned to biological instincts. Infants, forexample, are programmed at birth to suckle, grasp, step, and re-spond to linguistic cues. "Babies as young as twenty minutes oldmay work to imitate an adult's expression" (p. 264). This drivetoward direct imitation appears to follow children throughouttheir development. Jolly draws on research conducted by psy-chologist Michael Tomasello and his colleagues who haveshown that direct imitation is extremely rare in even our closestprimate relatives. "Show a young ape how to pull candies into acage, by turning a little rake over so that the bar scrapes the can-dies along. At an age when human children follow the demon-stration exactly, the chimps merely gesture with the rake" (p.299). What Jolly shows us is that if anything sets humans asidefrom the rest of the animal kingdom it is the way in which welearn. Humans, especially during the first few years of life, "de-mand to be taught" (p. 303).

Jolly thus highlights a significantly different way to look atthe interaction between culture and biology. Anthropologistshave traditionally filled the gap between humans and animalswith reference to fossil hominids and associated technologicalachievements (e.g., stone tool industries, controlled use of fire,artistic expression). In the approach Jolly champions, the dividebetween humans and other animals is bridged instead by the de-veloping mind of the human child. At birth, infants have a bio-logical drive to acquire information. The culture that surroundsthem provides the content. In essence, it is during childhood (notthe Pleistocene) that we become human.

The biological basis of human behavior has received renewedattention in recent years, and there have been significant newdevelopments in the way scholars approach this issue. Contribu-tions have come from an increasingly diverse array of fields,including human genetics, linguistics, developmental psychol-ogy, and evolutionary biology. Readers interested in keeping upwith these developments will find in Lucy's Legacy an extensiveand highly engaging review from an author uniquely qualifiedto integrate this disparate material. •©•

The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates CanTell Us. Barbara J. King, ed. Santa Fe, NM: School of Ameri-can Research, 1999. 442 pp.

JULIA FISCHER

University of Pennsylvania

In the fall of 1996, Barbara King organized a seminar aboutthe "Origins of Language." The present volume documents con-tributions to this meeting. King opens the book by providing theframework for many of the chapters that follow. She reviews thedifferent approaches taken to the evolution of human language,focusing specifically on the question of whether languageshould be viewed as unique to the human species or as a continu-ous trait common to all primates. King clearly leans toward acontinuity approach and has a favorable, if not unbalanced, viewof any evidence that might support the notion that nonhumanprimates behave in a linguistic fashion. She apparently believesthat this makes her part of an unfairly oppressed scientific mi-nority.

The next two chapters, however, make for a much better read:Dario Mastripieri presents results of a comparative study on ma-caque gestural repertoires. He relates the diversity of the reper-toire to the dominance style particular to each of three species,suggesting that more egalitarian species develop a more elabo-rate communicative system. Next, Charles Snowdon reviewsdata on modifiability of nonhuman primate vocalizations, suchas "babbling" in infant pygmy marmosets and social influenceson call structure in tamarins and marmosets. Curiously, this isthe only chapter reviewing studies of nonhuman primate vocali-zations. Given the fact that in humans, speech is the predomi-nant fashion of language, I found this bias against vocal commu-nication in monkeys and apes a serious weakness. On the otherhand, the evidence for a continuity between humans and nonhu-man primates in the vocal domain isn't all that overwhelming.Therefore it is little wonder that those seeking to document thecontinuity have had to turn to other communicative domains.

In her contribution, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh laments the strictcriteria imposed by "Science as we know it" (Science with acapital "S") and argues instead for a more intuitive approach tounderstanding ape communication. She then embarks on alengthy "satire" in which she stages a meeting between herselfand a fictitious character, Dr. Wally Tycouth. Tycouth, ofcourse, has got it all wrong, and she ends the chapter by pointingout his fallacies. Obviously, this chapter is misplaced in a seri-ous treatise on the origins of language.

Kathleen Gibson and Stephen Jesse first briefly discuss thedifferences in speaking abilities between apes and humans.

240 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 103, No. 1 • MARCH 2001

They argue persuasively that the evolutionary constraints lie inthe neurological control of the vocal and respiratory muscula-ture rather than in differences in the anatomy of the vocal tract.According to Gibson and Jesse, the "keys to the evolution ofboth language and speech lie in the brain" (p. 193). They thenprovide a thorough review of different measures of brain sizeand functional aspects related to this measure. From this evi-dence, they set out to model the linguistic capacities of earlyhominids and the common ancestors of apes and humans.

Ian Davidson then provides an outline of his view of the conti-nuity and discontinuity between human language and nonhu-man primate vocalizations. His core argument is that humansstructure the world by labeling it. Because we use different la-bels to describe human "language" as opposed to "animal com-munication," for instance, we have created a discontinuity be-tween human language and the vocalizations of nonhumanprimates. It seems equally likely, however, that we use these dif-ferent labels precisely because human language has so manyunique features that it must be categorized separately.

Lorraine McCune presents a review of her own studies onprelinguistic vocal communication in human babies. She exam-ined the developmental trajectory of human infant "grunts." Ac-cording to McCune, the grunt is first related to the metabolicstate of the i nf an t, then used to draw attenti on, and fi nally utteredin a referential fashion. Although I believe that the analysis ofearly vocal behavior provides important insights into the originsof speech, I was irritated by McCune's view that "communica-tion is successful [when] the receiving individual experiencesan internal state of meaning closely related to that expressed bythe sender" (p. 270). Along a similar line, both McCune andKing repeatedly evoke the concept of "information donation,"giving rise to the suspicion that they have deliberately or care-lessly ignored the divergent interests of sender and receivers.

Robbins Burling first provides a layout of the different typesof signs in communicative events. He distinguishes between ar-bitrary and what he calls "motivated" signs (which include indi-ces and icons), both in the vocal and in the gestural domain. Hethen uses this framework to discuss the accomplishments ofapes, and, to a lesser degree, monkeys.

In his contribution, Sherman Wilcox pits two different ap-proaches to the evolution of language against each other. Ac-cording to Wilcox, the "Cartesian approach" (p. 353) is domi-nated by the search of language precursors. In his view,however, this approach is hampered by a priori assumptions ofdiscontinuity. The "cognitive approach," in contrast, assumesthat language relies on some basic cognitive abilities. Wilcox ar-gues that language should be viewed as a form of "articulatorygesturing" (p. 363) that involves both visible gestures and vo-calizations. Assuming that the continuity between nonhumanprimates and humans is in the cognitive domain, the questionimmediately arises whether this continuity is reserved for the or-der of primates or whether it is extended to other mammals, too.However, none of the authors favoring the continuity assump-tion chose to discuss this issue.

It should now be clear that the subtitle is essentially mislead-ing: I had expected an assembly of studies that focused on thecommunication of nonhuman primates, and how they might in-form us on the origins of human language. Instead, the authorsof the majority of the chapters put humans at the center of atten-tion. A minor point of criticism concerns the fact that all references

are presented together at the end of the book, so that it becomesdifficult to use single chapters in seminars. Despite the notedshortcomings of the book, it will hopefully stimulate further sci-entific treatment of this fascinating subject, drawing in a bal-anced fashion from the various research perspectives on thistopic. For the sake of good science, it is to be hoped that soberand self-critical approaches retain the upper hand. •>

Primate Behavioral Ecology. Karen B. Strier. NeedhamHeights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. 392 pp.

W. C. MCGREW

Miami University-Ohio

Primatology has been waiting fora new synthetic textbook onthe behavioral ecology of apes, monkeys, and prosimians. Thestandard predecessors, Alison Richard's Primates in Nature(W. H. Freeman, 1985) and Barbara Smuts et al.'s Primate So-cieties (University of Chicago Press, 1986) are outdated in afast-moving field. Now comes a worthy successor that is timelyand comprehensive. (It also complements nicely another newtextbook written by a laboratory primatologist, DeanFalk'sfie-havioral Primatology, W. W. Norton, 2000).

The author is a biological anthropologist and an experiencedfield primatologist. Happily, she has researched both New andOld World monkeys in nature; she is the world's expert on themuriqui, or woolly spider monkey. She also has made good useof the expertise of her distinguished colleagues at the Universityof Wisconsin (e.g., Schoeninger, Snowdon, Sober, Ziegler).She comes across as a bit modest, as her preface is brief and for-mal, there are no biographical notes, and the only photograph ofher (p. 81)isunlabeled.

The book is straightforwardly organized in 12 chapters: (1)"Introduction to Primate Studies"; (2) 'Traits, Trends, and Tax-onomy"; (3) "Primates Past to Present"; (4) "Evolution and So-cial Behavior"; (5) "Evolution and Sex"; (6) "Food and Fe-males"; (7) "Female Strategies"; (8) "Male Strategies"; (9)"Developmental Stages"; (10) "Communication and Cogni-tion"; (11) "Community Ecology"; and (12) "Conservation."These total 338 pages of text; for teaching purposes, twice asmany chapters, each of half the length, would be more manage-able. Chapter 4 alone covers (masterfully) everything frommeiosis and mitosis to altruism.

The core of the book is chapters 5-8, with their thoroughtreatment of life's key variable, sex. (Gender is never men-tioned.) Even the most knowledgeable primatologist will notfail to be impressed by how much more we know now about TheGreat Game than we did 15 years ago. However, the best singlechapter is the first one, which in 34 pages provides an attractiveintroduction and orientation for the newcomer to the field. Itsuser-friendliness makes it most apt, even for undergraduateswith minimal background. Given that many students are keenon conservation issues, these are stressed from the book's firstparagraph to the last, and therefore the final chapter is a sum-ming-up rather than just a grafted-on appendage.

The weakest chapters are 9 and 10. The former deals onlywith sub-adulthood, leaving most of the lifespan covered frag-mentarily; aging is omitted. The latter has a useful treatment on