It took me literally two years to finish this book. The problem with Merlin Donald's prose is that it is too dense with allusions to literatures, and the ideas of people that Donald refers to aren't explained clearly at all. Merlin Donald tends to inflate pargraphs the ideas expressed by which should have been possible to be presented in a couple of sentences rather than several pages.

The underlying idea, or rather the rule of thumb that guides the train of thought and speculations presented in this book is a simple extension of neo-Darwinism to species endowed with culture; here 'culture' means roughly those entities that are studied by the discipline of ethology. Evolution might well be said to be operating in the physiological and anatomical level, but for a picture of adaptation to pressure to be painted, it is not enough to single out some features of the human mind or brain such as encephalization, cerebral laterality, consciousness, etc., but rather the circumstance under which certain feature emerged; environmental factors, in its broad sense, that forced the archaic human in a certain evolutionary stage to evolve into another stage, i.e. to evolve phyletically. One example is the organizational structure of society, which, for the society member might be an environmental factor, while not environmental in its traditional-materialist sense. This crucial insight is given by Henry Plotkin and his colleagues, and Donald is utilizing the insight to its full strength, synthesizing theories from cognitive science and archaeology and ethology, given the factual data available to him.

I myself don't have the patience and the mindset to memorize the tons of dry facts Merlin Donald presents, and this book is clearly a pseudo-monograph written more or less for professionals, sometimes too elementary, sometimes too technical (maybe too specific is a better way to put it) and fringe for a general reader. It would be good if someone can write a shorter book that can serve as a general introduction, or restructure the book in a readable manner, separating factual data and speculations apart. This book is more a handbook, a guide to the literature around the time of writing.

It might also be that I am simply not interested in the details of human cognitive evolution, but a larger picture of how intelligence seen as an abstract entity emerged, found human beings as its host, and at the same time generated the phenomenological-or even the ontological Universe. So for me the sole interest of reading this book is to see how the externalization of things such as memories should be seen in a large scale. Is it a "symbiosis between brain and culture", or should it be seen as an endosymbiogenesis, a process in which cognitive atoms become substrata of a being with its own purpose, much in the way Naturphilosophie speculates?