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This book is designed to introduce the evolutionary origins of the human brain’s present structures and functions. Evolutionary neuropsychology is a new multidisciplinary science that embraces and uses empirical findings from the fields of evolution, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology. This book is designed for the intellectually curious, but styled especially for academics at any level and psychologists focusing on various aspects of human behavior. The bedrock foundation of evolutionary neuropsychology is the assumption that functionally specialized brain regions are adaptations naturally selected in response to various environmental challenges over the course of billions of years of evolution. These adaptations and their brain regions and circuitry may now serve new functions, which are called exaptations, and they are particularly involved in higher cognitive functions.

With Statistics: A Gentle Introduction, Third Edition, an introductory stats class needn't be difficult or dull! This textbook has been specifically designed to curtail students' anxieties and minimize unnecessary formulas, while providing a comprehensive review of basic statistical designs and analyses. A wealth of additional real-world examples have been included to give a sense of how the science of statistics works, solves problems, and helps us make informed choices about the world we live in. The author minimizes the use of formulas, but provides a step-by-step approach to their solution, and includes a glossary of key terms, symbols, and definitions at the end of each chapter. Every chapter also includes a short story about historical and contemporary statisticians who figured prominently in the evolution of the discipline of statistics. New to the Third Edition is the thorough incorporation of SPSS throughout, more visual material and figures, and an enhanced treatment of effect sizes, and more detailed explanation of statistical concepts.

There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals--some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours?In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples of their genes--one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary--words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture--looking at their treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body coloring--and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite.Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds and culture.