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Social Cohesion and Human Nature

The Reith Lectures

CHAPTER

The Evolution of Man

The transition from the family to the small tribe was presumably biologically connected with the fact that hunting could be more efficient if it was co operative. The most distinctive feature by which the evolutionary status of these early ancestors is fixed is the size of the brain, which increased fairly rapidly until it reached about its present capacity,. but has now been virtually stationary for hundreds of thousands of years. We have still, it would seem, the instincts which led men before their behaviour had become deliberate to live in a small tribe with a sharp antithesis of internal friendship and external hostility.

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