Alan Barnard is Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa at the University of Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1978. He has undertaken a wide range of ethnographic fieldwork and archaeological research in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, is a participant in the British Academy Centenary Research project 'From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain' and serves as Honorary Consul of the Republic of Namibia in Scotland. His numerous publications include History and Theory in Anthropology (2000) and Anthropology and the Bushman (2007).

• 1. Introduction; 2. If chimps could talk; 3. Fossils and what they tell us; 4. The brain and group size; 5. Teaching, sharing and exchange; 6. Origins of language and symbolism; 7. Elementary structures of kinship; 8. A new synthesis; 9. Conclusions.

'This is a seminal attempt to bring social and evolutionary anthropology back into the same frame, to allow social anthropology once again to make a serious contribution to accounts of human origins.' Robin Dunbar, University of Oxford