Genes, Peoples, and Languages

Genes, Peoples, and Languages

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Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question—anticipated by Darwin—with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past hundred thousand years of human evolution.Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification.

 

Genes, Memes, and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution

Genes, Memes, and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution

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As biological information is passed through genes, so cultural information is passed through what Richard Dawkins has termed memes'. In this theoretical but readable study, Shennan explores the potential for a neo-Darwinian evolutionary approach to some of the major concerns and issues within archaeology in recent times. Drawing on the work of Richard Dawkins as a stimulus, Shennan reviews the concept of memes as applied to animal behaviour and critiques their role in relation to human populations. Arguing that archaeologists are currently struggling with a lost past, this study reinforces what should be the prime concern of archaeology - to search for valid knowledge and to seek to make sense of long-term patterning and material culture. Shennan puts forward a framework to this end and applies it to looking at how humans exploit resources, population histories, the transmission of cultural traditions, male-female relationships and social evolution, competition and warfare.