Very few scientific texts written over 130 years ago can still inspire contemporary research.

The Role of Labour in the Transformation of Ape into Man and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels were attempts to develop and popularize the ideas of the science of their time. It is a tribute to Engels - and the method that he and Marx developed in the mid-1840s - that even today they offer us concepts and ideas that are lacking in so many modern texts on the evolution of our species and society.

They contain many points that need to be sifted through and reformulated in light of all the discoveries made since Engels' death. But what remains has immense value. It serves as an invaluable reference point for anyone who wants to draw conclusions using the vast amount of empirical material produced almost daily by archaeologists and anthropologists.

And thus it helps us to refute the nonsense of the theorists of 'sociobiology' and the 'naked ape', who claim that capitalism is inevitable because it is based on the foundations of an unchanging 'human nature'.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]