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have emerged without the development of cultural genotypes that conceptualize social distance in a manner that makes people comfortable with being part of the ‘densely interacting social networks’ that give improved economic pay-offs. Others have discussed the kinds of social institutions and associated social norms that provide the glue that keeps large-scale societies together, but Ortman is more interested in identifying the specific content of the conceptual metaphors of actual social groups and how they have changed over time. He sketches a Southwestern US example where they can be traced using a combination of historical linguistics, oral traditions and material culture. In the final substantive chapter, Peregrine strongly defends the position that the stages in the traditional social evolutionary taxonomies of Service and Fried represent real social patterns. He argues that they represent convergent ‘recurrent social formations’ that arise from a systematic relationship between the technology and scale of societies, demonstrated through the analysis of data from the Atlas of Cultural Evolution (Peregrine 2003); only a limited range of stable social forms exists. These are conceptualized as peaks in an adaptive landscape that itself is changing through time so that as the technology and scale of societies changes, new social forms become more successful: early states represent one of those peaks. In summary, this is a stimulating book that brings together developing approaches that open out the stale discussions on the origin of complex societies in interesting new directions. However, I am not sure that it will win over comparison sceptics.