Kinship and Human Evolution: Making Culture, Becoming Human offers an exciting new explanation of human evolution. Based on insights from anthropology, it shows how humans became "cultured" beings capable of symbolic thought by developing kinship-based exchange relationships. Kinship was as an adaptive response to the harsh environment caused by the last major ice age. In the extreme ice age conditions, natural selection favored those groups that could forge and sustain such alliances, and the resulting relationships enabled them to share different food resources between groups. Kinship was a means of symbolically linking two or more groups, to the mutual reproductive advantage of both. From an evolutionary point of view, kinship freed humans from their dependence on their immediate environment, vastly expanding the niches they could occupy. If we take kinship to be the major factor in human evolution, networks and alliances must precede cultural units, becoming the defining element of localized cultures. Kinship and Human Evolution argues that it is living in networks that produces cultural differences and not culturally different groups that encounter one another; it shows that kinship both saved and created humanity as we know it, in all its cultural diversity.

The Social and Cultural Order of Ancient Egypt offers a completely new interpretation of Ancient Egypt. Based on insight from anthropology it complement and enhance the archeological material and gives some new interpretation on otherwise accepted truths about Ancient Egypt. It is argued that Ancient Egyptian culture can only be understood in relation to its reproductive condition and that Ancient Egypt must be seen as part of a larger regional trade network including the Levant and Mesopotamia in the west, Nubia, and Africa to the south. Egypt’s splendors would not have been possible without such trade opportunities that made it possible for a small section of society to export gold for foreign prestige goods. This laid the foundation for a steep social hierarchy and paved the way towards the Old Kingdom. This new perspective makes it possible to interpret e.g., that The Narmer Palette is not about unification, it is telling about Narmer’s position in a larger cosmos. Enclosures were not places for funerary preparations, but places for collecting tax. Pyramids are not graves but places for the ‘gods’ Re and Osiris to meet and rejuvenate the cosmos.

Simple Lives, Cultural Complexity explores how people manage to live relatively simple lives while remaining seemingly unaware of the cultural complexity they produce while doing so. Using complexity theory, the book reconceptualizes culture as a complex dynamic system called cultural complexity, and argues that cultural complexity arises from persistent interactions among people and groups who act according to simple rules. The order produced is different from, and not reducible to, the interactions that created it. People only need simple rules of engagement in order to cope with their surroundings: rules that can be enacted through all kinds of strategies, and that together produce very complex emergent properties. Bergendorff argues that people do not need to know their entire "cultural order" and its formal logics to cope with everyday life. They do not need to be enculturated; they only need to be enskilled to act in everyday situations. Theoretically dense and rich, this book offers an innovative perspective on the concept of culture and the many ways that it is deployed and understood by its bearers.