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Before the Dawn Evolutionary Psychology

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Submitted By petethegreat36
Words 1769
Pages 8
4/10/14
Book Report: Before the Dawn Before the Dawn was published in 2006 and was written by Nicholas Wade. It has been praised by many for its meaty content as well as readability, and can be enjoyed by people who are not so scientifically literate. The book covers a comprehensive range of topics relating to the history of human evolution and migration. He begins the book with a couple of short stories, one about finding the date of the evolution of body hair loss, and another about discovering whether President Jefferson had a slave mistress, and he delves into his theories on why the genome provides a recorded history of an organism, primarily humans. The next chapters talk about our African origins, the sparks of language, leaving Africa 50,000 years ago, and our differentiation by spreading across the world. Further in the book he speaks on our transition from nomadic lifestyles, social behavior, our ethnicities/race, deeper into language, further into history, and finally evolution. He continually comes back to the idea of acting “behaviorally modern” to shape our societies which, in turn shaped us individually. Before the Dawn gives a solid perspective on the history and sources of humans’ unrecorded historical changes. Wade addresses human aggression and relates it to the aggressive nature of chimps against bonobos. Chimps, being male-dominated, are highly aggressive and regularly go on killing raids against other groups. Bonobos, being female-dominated, are not aggressive and use sex as a means of problem resolution. They are nearly identical except to the fact that bonobo ovulation is concealed. Humans are historically male dominated, but ovulation is concealed. He notes that we are the most bipolar of the apes, since we are more aggressive than chimps and more tight-knit emotionally than bonobos. This phenomenon is not directly explained. I believe

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