LAUSR

ties. This is all well and good, and it certainly convinced me that we should take play as seriously as ritual. But how to test these hypotheses? Although the specific archaeological contributions are of uniformly high quality, the lack of contributions by cognitive scientists to overarching interpretations is a weakness—as is the relatively casual coverage of human evolution, which I expected to be stronger given the book’s title. Perhaps Freud is unfashionable in social science nowadays, but I was surprised to see a complete lack of acknowledgement of Freud’s notions that neuroses are individual religions and that religions are collective neuroses (in Totem and Taboo, 1913). Understanding how rituals often begin with individual repetitive eccentricities would have provided a useful bridge between the animal and human worlds. Despite these minor criticisms, this book is an informative read, and it certainly advances an understanding of the expression of play and ritual in early societies, if not specific methodologies for elucidating its evolution scientifically. In this way, it joins other Templeton Foundation–funded projects, which forward logical interpretations but leave us with a number of untested hypotheses.