The Evolution of Culture: A Historical and Scientific Overview / Edition 1

by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight, Camilla Power

Overview

The Evolution of Culture seeks to explain the origins, evolution and character of human culture, from language, art, music and ritual to the use of technology and the beginnings of social, political and economic behavior. It is concerned not only with where and when human culture evolved, but also asks how and why.

The book draws together original contributions by archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists. By integrating evolutionary biology with the psychological, social and cultural sciences, it shows how contemporary evolutionary thinking can inform study of the peculiarly human phenomenon of symbolic culture. The contributors call into question the gulf currently separating the natural from the cultural sciences. Human capacities for culture, they argue, evolved through standard processes of natural and sexual selection, and properly be analyzed as biological adaptations.

The book is fully referenced and indexed, and contains a guide to further reading. It has been written to be accessible to the growing multidisciplinary readership now asking questions about human origins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813527314
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	08/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

CAMILLA POWER is a research student at University College, London. 

Table of Contents

The contributors
Preface
1. An evolutionary approach to human culture
Part I. The Evolution of Society
2. The evolution of social organization
3. Symbolism as reference and symbolism as culture
4. Modern hunter-gatherers and early symbolic culture
Part II. The Evolution of Art and Religion
5. Sexual selection for cultural displays
6. 'Beauty magic': the origins of art
7. The origin of symbolic culture
8. Symbolism and the supernatural
Part III. The Evolution of Language
9. The evolution of language and languages
10. Culture, honesty and the freerider problem
11. Language variation and the volution of societies
12. Sex and language as pretend-play
Further reading
Author index
Subject index