Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.

Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today’s great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.

A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

迈克尔.托马塞洛（Michael Tomasello）

美国发展与比较心理学家。德国马克普朗克进化人类学研究院联合院长，德国莱比锡大学心理学系荣誉教授，美国杜克大学名誉教授。

从20世纪90年代起，多项学术大奖荣誉加身，被公认为当代最权威的发展与比较心理学家，是世界范围内少数被多学科领域认可的学术权威之一。他关于社会认知起源的先锋性研究，开启了发展心理学与灵长类认知研究的独特视角。

所获荣誉（部分）：

· 2003年入选德国国家科学院（German National Academy of Sciences）

· 2006年荣获被誉为心灵哲学诺贝尔奖的法国让-尼科奖(Jean Nicod Prize)

· 2010年入选匈牙利国家科学院（Hungarian National Academy of Sciences）

· 2015年荣获美国心理协会杰出科学贡献大奖

· 2017年入选美国艺术与科学院（American Academy of Arts & Sciences）

· 2017年入选美国国家科学院（National Academy of Sciences）

译者 苏彦捷

北京大学心理学系导师、教授，北京大学元培学院副院长。以发展心理学、生物心理学为研究方向，参编多本教材，译著如《发展心理学》、《女性心理学》、《环境心理学》、《生理心理学》、《心理学与人生》。