The Evolution of Culture: A Historical and Scientific Overview

by Chris Knight, Robin I.M. Dunbar (Editor), Camilla Power (Editor)

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.

Genres: Anthropology, History, Psychology, Science, Cultural

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Professor Knight gained his PhD in 1987 for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume 'Mythologiques'. He became a lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London in 1989. Knight is a founding member of the "Radical Anthropology Group". He is currently a senior research fellow at University College London.

Since 1966, Knight has been exploring the idea that language and symbolic culture emerged in the human species through a process of Darwinian evolution culminating at a certain point in revolutionary change. Becoming human was, according to this theory, a classic instance of a dialectical process, i.e. one in which quantitative change culminates eventually in a qualitative leap.

In 1996, Knight co-founded the EVOLANG series of international conferences on the origins of language, since when he has become a prominent figure in debates on the origins of human symbolic culture and especially the origin of language.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of the papers there were about the 'sham menstruation' theory of culture. Roughly, this is the idea that menstruation is a signal of fertility that men should pick up on, which creates a threat to other females. So females get together with their fathers/brothers and 1) regulate access to the menstruating/fertile females 2) confuse the males about who is menstruating and who is not by painting themselves red and 'sharing' the menstrual blood. And this is the origin of culture because it involves pretend-play (females who are not menstruating pretending that they are), 'counter-reality' signaling (in Knight's words), and of course explains the prohibition of incest better than Levi-Strauss (because the fathers/brothers are not going to sleep with their kin if the whole point of the coalition is to regulate access to females... I'm not sure this explanation is really convincing: why could they not?).

I was wondering what Knight, Power, Watts et alii would say about fake estrus, pseudopregnancy, etc. in other animals: what's the difference with sham menstruation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudop...

[Lawrence Sullivan]

If you might be interested in how chimps became chimps and humans became humans and why the stories seem so much the same, this is a good introduction to the riddle. You should come out of this read with more questions than you started with. That would mean this is an honest book.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the development of language, symbolic culture, religion, ect.

Multiple essays from multiple authors provides different viewpoints and insights.

Highly Recommended.