Customer Reviews:
 The best book ever on our primate past January 3, 1999
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is by far the best book I have read about the behavior of primates, including humans, with regards to violence, genocide, infanticide, lesbianism (bonobos), mate selection, etc. This book is another large step in dispelling culture as the basis for aggression. If we are to get beyond violence, war, wife beating, and hatred we have to understand how these forces came about in our evolutionary past. This book looks at our four closest relatives: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans and uses their life history to construct human evolution. This book reads like a novel, and can be appreciated by the novice as well as the academic. And it doesn't shy away from facing what we are really about; dominate males, and females who want to mate with dominate males because they are better adapted to pass on genes to the next generation. But it also explains how we can turn our backs on that pattern by understanding it, and behaving differently. For me, one of the exiting things about understanding human evolution is that I no longer have to follow the herd. I can get an understanding of the tensions between the sexes and rise above it to some extent. Understanding is the first step towards changing behavior that is innate, but not necessary.
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