Our Social Roots: How Local Ecology Shapes Our Social Structures

Abstract

There is overwhelming evidence that wide-ranging aspects of human biology and human behavior can be considered as adaptations to different subsistence systems. Wider environmental and ecological correlates of behavioral and cultural traits are generally best understood as being mediated by differences in subsistence strategies. Modes of subsistence profoundly influence both human biology, as documented in genetic changes, and human social behavior and cultural norms, such as kinship, marriage, descent, wealth inheritance, and political systems. Thus both cultural and biological factors usually need to be considered together in studies of human evolutionary ecology, combined in specifically defined evolutionary models. Models of cultural adaptation to environmental conditions can be subjected to the same or similar tests that behavioral ecologists have used to seek evidence for adaptive behavior in other species. Phylogenetic comparative methods are proving useful, both for studying co-evolutionary hypotheses (cultural and/or gene–culture co-evolution), and for estimating ancestral states of prehistoric societies. This form of formal cross-cultural comparison is helping to put history back into anthropology, and helping us to understand cultural evolutionary processes at a number of levels.