I wanted to enjoy this book, hoping it would have something new about early man I didn't know but before, but really didn't. I ended up getting not very far at all before I couldn't stand any more. The way the author kept calling things like social hierarchies 'imagined fictions' grated on me.
If I'm a dumb dog, and I go to food, and observe another dog tries to bite me whenever I go near that food, and that dog is bigger than me and won't bite me if I wait my turn, then my lack of imagination doesn't stop that situation from being reality. Similarly, society doesn't need fictions from things like religion - it did serve a useful function and I don't mind a book that acknowledges that early society used it for things like banding together to attack a common 'enemy' (read: the guy with food/goods you want) or to justify laws (something that 'hey, we do not like it when our neighbors murder each other, maybe let us all agree to gang up on the murdery guy' would be sufficient to do, and doesn't require any fiction in the slightest, just a recognition of other people's mental states and plans, which, last I checked, are stored in neurons and thus entirely material nonfictional things) but I just really detest the particular word choices here. I wanted more scholarly established history, less personal philosophy.

Read Gun, Germs and Steel instead for genuinely interesting hypotheses in a book that at least tries to back up its ideas with actual history and evidence, such as zebra behavior making them undomesticateable (though since wild horses turned out to just be feral ones - or may be, it's been awhile since I've read that article, it may be debatable how much we can learn from comparing Pretzwalksi wild horse behavior in captivity to zebra).