I found 'deep history', fascinating, though one can see why some specialists wouldn't like it - even with my limited background it's easy to spot some ways in which he either distorts or misunderstands other people's fields - for example he suggests at one early point that Dawkins 'proposed' the meme, when in fact Dawkins did no such thing. As I recall he didn't even postulate the meme, he merely invented the idea as one possible way to explain aspects of humanity that otherwise might not fit neatly into his fixation with darwinian evolution as the explanation for everything! Dawkins did take the idea further after some US universities had created mimetics as a field of study . . . . and there may still be some people hooked on it. Susan Blackmore ( http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html) is a good walking, talking example of a Dawkins follower entirely hooked on Darwinism as the answer, whatever the question. For the avoidance of doubt I think she talks "plausible b*ll*cks"!

I also like (ie am entertained by!) the way Smail freely cites rather strongly opposed perspectives where they suit his line of argument. It would be great to get Smail in the same room with Dawkins and Stephen J Gould and chair their discussion, though sadly we'll have to wait for the afterlife to get Gould.

No idea really how significant (or even how valid) Smail's conclusions are; sadly it doesn't appear that many people or departments have summoned up the substantial specialist resources that would be needed to go seriously down his line. However I see there's a more recent book (November 2011): Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by a multidisciplinarty team (including Smail), be interesting to see how much more work they've done. ( )

Smail's concept is that there is an artificial divide between pre-history (what he calls deep history) and history and that the biological and evolutionary history of humanity can be better understood by bridging the gap. At least that's what I think it was about because unfortunately my brain was too small to grasp much of this book. For a slender book, Smail did an exhaustive amount of work detailing the idea of when history began through the ages and the time when history "begins" has remained steady even as the reasoning as moved from sacred to scientific. In place of the current paradigm, Smail proposes a neurohistory or a study of the evolution of the human brain. Interesting stuff even if most of it went over my head. ( )

I slogged through this book. It took awhile and there were a few lessons, but it sort of rambled away on tangents. ( )

Full review: ( http://bachlab.balbach.net/coolread4.html#deephistory ) in summary: excellent historiographical and philosophy of history essay on how to incorporate evolution into the study of history. ( )

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