The family dinner, the client luncheon, the holiday spread--the idea of people coming together for a meal seems the most natural thing in the world. But that is certainly not the case for most other members of the animal kingdom. In Feast, archeologist Martin Jones presents both historic and modern scientific evidence to illuminate how prehistoric humans first came to share food and to trace the ways in which the human meal has shaped our cultural evolution.
Jones shows that by studying the activities of our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, and by unearthing ancient...