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Cultural Cladistics and the Early Prehistory of North America

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Evolutionary Biology: Mechanisms and Trends

Abstract

Anthropology has always had as one of its goals the explanation of human cultural diversity across space and through time. Over the past few years, there has been a growing appreciation among anthropologists that the approaches biologists have developed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of species are useful tools for building and explaining patterns of human diversity. One of these methods is cladistics, which is a means of creating testable propositions of heritable continuity—how one thing is related to another in terms of descent. Cladistics has now been applied to a number of cultural data sets. Here we discuss several of these studies, paying particular attention to a series of related papers in which we have applied cladistics to stone tools in an effort to shed light on the early prehistory of North America. Together, these studies demonstrate that cladistics can be fruitfully applied to a range of questions concerning cultural evolutionary processes and events in prehistory.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the invitation of the organizers of the sixteenth Evolutionary Biology Meeting for the opportunity to present our work and to include it in this volume. In particular, we thank Pierre Pontarotti and Marie-Hélène Rome. We also thank Melody Galen for creating several of the figures. MJO, BB, and MB are supported by research funding from the University of Missouri. BB’s work has also been supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, postdoctoral fellowship grants from the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. MC is supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and Simon Fraser University. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this research are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the above-mentioned funding bodies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Michael J. O’Brien, Briggs Buchanan & Matthew T. Boulanger

  2. Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Briggs Buchanan & Mark Collard

Authors
  1. Michael J. O’Brien
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  2. Briggs Buchanan
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  3. Mark Collard
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  4. Matthew T. Boulanger
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Correspondence to Michael J. O’Brien .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS UMR 6632, Labo. Evolution Biologique et, Université d'Aix-Marseille, place Victor Hugo 3, Marseille CX 03, 13331, France

    Pierre Pontarotti

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O’Brien, M.J., Buchanan, B., Collard, M., Boulanger, M.T. (2012). Cultural Cladistics and the Early Prehistory of North America. In: Pontarotti, P. (eds) Evolutionary Biology: Mechanisms and Trends. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30425-5_2

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