HENRY

Stephen Shennan in the 2008 Annual Review of Anthropology (doi):

The term evolution in archaeology has accumulated an enormous range of meanings, with different implications, over many years. Traditionally, however, when not referring to the biological evolution of putatively ancestral species, it has occurred most commonly in the phrase cultural evolution (sometimes used interchangeably with social or sociocultural evo- lution), referring to the history of what are conceived as the key long-term trends in human history: from foraging to farming, or from farming to the origins of civilization and the state, accompanied by such developments as increased population, greater social complexity and inequality, and more complex technologies.

More recently, the term has increasingly come to refer to the idea that the processes producing cultural stability and change are analogous in important respects to those of biological evolution: On this view, just as biological evolution is characterized by changing frequencies of genes in populations through time as a result of such processes as natural selection, so cultural evolution refers to the changing distributions of cultural attributes in populations, likewise affected by processes such as natural selection but also by others that have no analog in genetic evolution. In fact, to understand changing patterns of human behavior and organization we need to take account of both the biological and the cultural dimensions.

Posted on June 24th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill