V. Gordon Childe was educated in Australia as an archaeologist. He adopted a Marxist approach to the evolution of human cultures, recognizing the interpenetration of cultures as populations came into contact and adopted techniques from one another. He stressed the importance of the development of human creativity and its growing effect on the pace and content of cultural evolution. He also recognized the interplay between biological and cultural evolution as the evolution of primates developed a lineage that culminated in the appearance of H. sapiens. The book was published in 1939.