Occasional Paper No. 45 of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Dunbar's Number, as the limit on the size of both social groups and personal social networks, has achieved something close to iconic status and is one of the most influential concepts to have emerged out of anthropology in the last quarter century. It is widely cited throughout the social sciences, archaeology, psychology and network science, and its reverberations have been felt as far afield as the worlds of business organization and social-networking sites, whose design it has come to underpin. Named after its originator, Robin Dunbar, whose career has spanned biological anthropology, zoology and evolutionary psychology, it stands testament to the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to human behaviour. In this collection Dunbar joins authors from a wide range of disciplines to explore Dunbar's Number's conceptual origins, as well as the evidence supporting it, and to reflect on its wider implications in archaeology, social anthropology and medicine
The celebrated Dunbar's Number is now well established as a key measure of human social organization -- but how did it come to be, what are its many ramifications? Full of stimulating ideas, this truly engaging collection is an indispensable way of finding out, its themes as appetising for general readers as students and academics
John Gowlett, Professor of Archaeology and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Liverpool
What Dunbar has initiated is a major shift in the study of human evolution . the injection of a social heart into the lifeless anatomy of past humanity
Give Gamble FBA, Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton
Editor: David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at UCL
Cover image: gelada baboons, Simien Mountains National Park, Ethiopia, by BluesyPete, reproduced under a CC 8Y-SA 3.0 licence from Wikimedia Commons
