Apes and humans still share 99 percent of their genetic material today. Nevertheless, it is only humanity that has managed to develop cognitive abilities that have produced complex structures such as linguistic communication and social organizations, high-performance industries, and corresponding technologies. How is this possible? Based on numerous experiments with primates and toddlers, Michael Tomasello develops a model of human thinking that can explain these phenomena by understanding cultural mediation as a biological mechanism. The elaboration of this central thesis sheds new light on numerous disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences and reveals the connection between these otherwise strictly separated "two cultures" in the light of evolutionary anthropology. Michael Tomasello is a co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.