Clive Gamble > Quotes

“Richard Dawkins called bits of cultural information memes and treated them as transmitted and inherited in the same way as genes. But whereas genes can be understood in terms of chromosomes and the ACGT bases that form DNA, memes cannot. For example, is each technounit in a well-made arrow a meme or is the entire implement? Is it possible to regard the belief system of the Catholic Church as a super meme? Trying to reduce culture to bits of information is to miss the point of its agency in human activity.”
― Clive Gamble, Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History

“From early times, humans had to make judgments about value. There is a high cost to carrying, and selection became important, so that good things were transported, and rubbish was not.”
― Clive Gamble, Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind

“This capacity to maintain a long series of exhalations is unique to humans, thanks to bipedal locomotion. In quadrupedal animals like monkeys and apes, the shoulder locks the chest wall whenever the weight is on one arm during movement, and this means they can only take one breath per walking cycle. In humans, the arms are freed from weight-bearing, and so we are able to disconnect the breathing and walking cycles. This becomes important later for the evolution of speech, because this too depends on being able to sustain long, uninterrupted exhalations. Otherwise, we would end up with one-word sentences!”
― Clive Gamble, Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind