Forty years on : Biosocial anthropology revisited / Hilary Callan --
Rethinking the relationship between studies of ethnobiological knowledge and the evolution of human cultural cognition / Roy Ellen --
Towards a theory of everything / Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis --
Sexual insult and female militancy / Shirley G. Ardener --
Who sees the elephant? Sexual egalitarianism in social anthropology's room / Morna Finnegan --
From metaphor to symbols and grammar : the cumulative cultural evolution of language / Andrew D.M. Smith and Stefan Hoefler --
Reconstructing a source cosmology for African hunter-gatherers / Camilla Power --
Sounds in the night : ritual bells, therianthropes and eland relations among the Hadza / Thea Skaanes --
Human physiology, San Shamanic healing and the 'cognitive revolution' / Chris Low --
Rain serpents in Northern Australia and Southern Africa : a common ancestry? / Ian Watts --
Bedouin matrilineality revisited / Suzanne E. Joseph --
'From Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain' : an open invitation for social anthropology to join the evolutionary debate / Wendy James.

Human Origins" brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.