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Against the Grain
Richard Manning
Publisher: North Point Press
Paperback: 240 pages
ISBN-10: 0865477132
ISBN-13: 9780865477131
Price: £8.00 in the UK. Go
here for more information.
In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years.
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