THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SUPERNATURAL

Jack Hunter, Spirits, Gods and Magic: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Supernatural, August Night Press, 2020.

Spirits, Gods and Magic is another example of a trend in several areas of academia and the social sciences – as in the work of Jeffrey J. Kripal and Arthur Versluis, to name but two – that calls into question the model of reality on which Western science, and much else, has long been based, chiefly because of science’s rejection of areas of human experience that don’t fit the model. 

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GOING APE

Bryan Sykes. The Nature of the Beast: The First Scientific Evidence on the Survival of Ape-men into Modern Times. Coronet, 2015.

Bryan Sykes is one of the pioneers of DNA ancestry, and in previous books has traced the migration patterns of modern humans around the world, and the peopling of the British Isles. Here he turns his attention to claims that there other kinds of hominids, humans and their relations in the world.
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ACCIDENTALLY HUMAN

Henry Gee. The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Popular media usually portray evolution, particularly human evolution as a sort of ladder of continuous sequence, starting with amoeba and ending with someone like Carl Sagan. Human being want to believe that they are the chosen species, the aim of evolution and that everything and everyone else are just steps on the way or rungs on the ladder. Gee calls this world view “human exceptionalism”

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ANIMAL MAGIC

Paul A. Trout. Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Prometheus Books, 2011.

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Pat Shipman. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. W. W. Norton, 2011.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch ! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!

This verse from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass summarise the thesis of Paul Trout’s book: the origins of language and religion in our ancestors’ fear and awe of terrible predators.

In his opening chapters Trout recounts the various giant predators our Palaeolithic ancestors had to content with from sabre toothed tigers, huge lizards, cave bears, giant bears and all sorts of other things that even the most fervent cryptozoologist would not wish to see surviving in remote places. 

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