This one’s the academic ancestor of a lot of what I’d already read this year, and going in after Henrich and Dennett meant I recognized the argument’s skeleton immediately, culture accumulating faster than any individual could invent it, humans doing something chimpanzees categorically don’t. What Tomasello adds that the more popular books gloss is the mechanism at the level of a single interaction, joint attention, the moment an infant first tracks where an adult is looking and understands that shared looking means something, a triangle of self, other, and object that he argues is the actual cognitive hinge everything cultural transmission swings on afterward.

The chimpanzee comparison chapters are the strongest part, specific experiments where chimps can imitate a result but not the method used to get there, copying the what without the how, versus human toddlers who’ll faithfully copy an adult’s unnecessary, inefficient extra steps just because that’s what was demonstrated, the famous “overimitation” finding. That gap, between results-copying and process-copying, is doing a lot of quiet explanatory work for why human culture ratchets upward instead of resetting every generation, and I hadn’t seen it laid out this precisely before.

I’m rating this a notch below the others mostly on readability, not rigor, this reads like the journal-adjacent monograph it essentially is, dense citation-heavy paragraphs with none of the narrative scaffolding Henrich uses to keep a general reader moving. Worth it if you’ve already got the popular versions in your head and want the harder floor underneath them, rough going if this is your first stop into the topic.