A01=Steen Bergendorff
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Author_Steen Bergendorff
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JHMC
Category=PSAJ
COP=United States
cultural diversity
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
exchange
human evolution
Kinship
Language_English
making culture
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
resource sharing
social theory
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781498524179
- Weight: 376g
- Dimensions: 159 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 07 Mar 2016
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Kinship and Human Evolution: Making Culture, Becoming Human offers an exciting new explanation of human evolution. Based on insights from anthropology, it shows how humans became “cultured” beings capable of symbolic thought by developing kinship-based exchange relationships. Kinship was as an adaptive response to the harsh environment caused by the last major ice age. In the extreme ice age conditions, natural selection favored those groups that could forge and sustain such alliances, and the resulting relationships enabled them to share different food resources between groups. Kinship was a means of symbolically linking two or more groups, to the mutual reproductive advantage of both. From an evolutionary point of view, kinship freed humans from their dependence on their immediate environment, vastly expanding the niches they could occupy. If we take kinship to be the major factor in human evolution, networks and alliances must precede cultural units, becoming the defining element of localized cultures. Kinship and Human Evolution argues that it is living in networks that produces cultural differences and not culturally different groups that encounter one another; it shows that kinship both saved and created humanity as we know it, in all its cultural diversity.
Steen Bergendorff is professor emeritus at Roskilde University.
