Full Description
What is the history of human populations? How are cultural traditions maintained and changed over time? Why did people destroy their environments in the past and were they ever conservationists? What led to the emergence of marked social inequalities? These are some of the questions that this text addresses and answers, in an application of neo-Darwinian evolutionary ideas to the human past. Stephen Shennan opens with the study of human behaviour, as acted upon by natural selection, and goes on to demonstrate that the same ideas can be applied to human societies, not just through the genes but through what Richard Dawkins has called "memes", units of cultural information which are passed on in our second inheritance system, culture. The book ranges from life history theory to game theory, and from the origins of farming to the collapse of societies.
Contents
Preface * 1. Introductionecology: the evolutionary study of behaviour * 3. Culture as an evolutionary system * 4. The evolutionary archaeology of cultural traditions * 5. Human life histories and their population consequences * 6. The archaeology of getting a living * 7. Male-female relations in an evolutionary perspective: the role of sexual selection * 8. The history of social contracts and the evolution of property * 9. Competition, co-operation and warfare: the role of group selection * 10. History, adaptation and self-organization
