ABSTRACT
This book comprises a series of chapters that span ideas relating to human origins, the nature of mind and human agency. As substantive areas there is nothing new in this as considerable empirical and theoretical research has been devoted to these topics over the years. What is perhaps less usual is the fact that a commentary on each of these should appear in the same text as an integrated analysis. Academic research is structured in the main on a disciplinary basis. Each group of social scientists have their own primary focus. Generally it is very unlikely that a social theorist would comment on, say, the classification of human fossil remains, or a phenomenologist pass judgment on some early feature of Australopithecus morphology. Similarly, biologist are not routinely given to cultural analyses nor social anthropologist to commentaries on the evolution of the brain. Each group makes its own contribution to our improving knowledge of ourselves, both individually and collectively.
