ABSTRACT
My next task is to sketch out the ways in which male bonding operates, and why i t may be regarded as a species-specific pattern. But first, I want to try to suggest how this propensity of behaviour may have become part of the biological infrastructure of man. W i t h a sense of the relative perilousness of any prehistoric analysis by a person untrained in the geological, biological, and medical disciplines which underlie the study of evolution, I must emphasize the neces sarily hypothetical quality of what follows. Even for specialists, the difficulty is acute of making judgements about the distant past by inference from bone and fossil remains. But despite this, and because the study of phylogeny may be too important to be left exclusively to 'phylogeneticists', there may be some real point in approaching issues raised by evolutionary analysis from a sociological point of view. As I noted in the Introduction to this book, i f there is to be a community of interest and fruitful symbiosis between the natural and social sciences, i t is necessary for some practitioners in each to strive to make their work pertinent to the concerns of their counterparts. I have no diplomatic ambitions, but I am interested in the possibility of linking the microhistory of social sciences to the macrohistory of species biology. The ensuing discussion of the way in which male bonding perhaps evolved is an effort in this direction.
