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Tales of the Ex-Apes argues that human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes and thus cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes. Marks shows that human evolution has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles - notably spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents - have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology.

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Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee and Why I Am Not a Scientist, both from UC Press.

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