The Culture Evolution

Physical anthropologists brought in the biological theory of evolution, based on the work of Darwin and others, and tried to relate it to culture evolution. Much of the work physical anthropology in the nineteenth century was designed to prove that there was a correlation between cultural and racial types.

People with less advanced cultures were thought to represent earlier stages in biological evolution, and this idea was used to explain cultural differences. Such theories both arose from and contributed to the prevailing racism of the period.

Linguistics and archaeology were also concerned with evolution, and this help make anthropology a unified field. Anthropological linguists were interested in the evolution of language and used both contemporary cultural anthropological studies and those of archaeological studies and those of archeologists to reconstruct earlier languages and trace their change over time. Later, as physical anthropologists became interested in studying the evolution of the capacity for culture, including the human capacity for speech and symbolic communication through language, anthropological linguists turned their interest in that direction as well.

For its part, archeology fit in well with evolutionary tendencies of anthropology in the nineteenth century. The study of past civilizations was an important contribution to the records of cultural and biological evolution, and to a lesser extent (through the records of literate civilizations) it helped document change in language over time. Archeologists and cultural anthropologists often worked together in plotting out the world’s societies, both past and present, on an evolutionary scale.
The Culture Evolution