Why has the human species been so successful? Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene that it was the ability to transmit memes (or ideas) from generation to generation that distinguished humans from all other animals. Roger Heppleston has developed the concept of memes to explain how humans came to be the most successful large mammal on the Earth. An ambitious synthesis of history, anthropology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary theory and ecology, Memes, Societies and Human Evolution can claim to be the first complete history of human society written from this evolutionary perspective....