The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson. David Wright. Sarah Ivory. Jeong-Heon Choi. Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological literature dealing with niche construction avoids hunter-gatherer behaviors, in part because they can be difficult to detect archaeologically. As the role of humans in shaping environments over long time scales becomes increasingly apparent, it is critical to develop archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun. Tyler Faith. Benjamin Davies. Mitchell Power. Matthew Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the past thirty years has witnessed tremendous advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we still know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Are there events in human evolution that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Benitez. John Murray.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most significant, yet understudied, subjects in paleoanthropology is the emergence of culture and its resulting transition from biological evolution to human-specific biocultural evolution. Scholarship on this topic has historically been lacking partly due to an absence of a coherent framework...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Kissel. Agustin Fuentes.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discerning the patterns and processes of human origins has been mostly centered on a gene-eye’s view of fitness landscapes. This interpretive structure is partiality undermined by modern biological thought that emphasizes a more holistic approach to evolution. We suggest that the broader framework of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael O'Brien.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As archaeology increasingly turns to explanatory models of cultural evolution based on a Darwinian perspective, three processes—dual inheritance, cultural transmission, and, more recently, niche construction—have assumed prominent positions. Until the early 1980s, the behavioral sciences tended to draw a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Ready. Michael Holton Price.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of research in human behavioral ecology (HBE) demonstrates that questions about human ecological and reproductive adaptations generally lead to questions about cooperation. Partly for this reason, much recent research in HBE has focused on issues such as marriage, cooperative child raising, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Perreault.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The quality of the archaeological record limits the range of evolutionary research questions archaeologists can ask. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis mostly describes micro-scale phenomena that unfold at the hierarchical level of the individual and over very short time scales. This means that most of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige. Deanna Dytchkowskyj. Charles Perreault.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extended evolutionary synthesis emphasizes the importance of understanding how the interaction of biological and cultural inheritance systems have shaped human evolution. Within the animal kingdom, modern humans possess a unique ability to transmit and maintain complex cultural traditions (Tennie et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the factors that influence variation in cultural complexity among groups is an important task for archaeologists. In this paper, I argue that niche construction may be one of these factors. I begin by showing that empirical work on the drivers of technological complexity in small-scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Marks.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As an analytic category, a culture shares many of the same difficulties that a species has in biology: notably, fuzzy boundaries, temporal instability, and extensive substructuring, which render it difficult to define adequately and comprehensively. Nevertheless, the symbolic world or semiotic matrix that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Scerri.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Models of recent human evolution are fundamentally rooted in the idea of tree-like genealogies and species concepts, regardless of the specifics. The range of explanatory models has elicited some consideration of the need for flexibility, yet without a reconsideration of the fundamental heuristics, we are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radu Iovita. David Braun. Matthew Douglass. Simon Holdaway. Sam Lin.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because lithics preserve better than almost any other trace of human existence in the deep past, they receive the lion’s share of attention from Pleistocene archaeologists. In this paper we explore the theoretical and practical limitations of using lithics as subjects of evolutionary analyses. We base our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Veatch. Thomas Sutikna. E. Wahyu Saptomo. Jatmiko. Matthew M. Tocheri.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent debates in anthropology surround the utility of human behavioral ecological (HBE) approaches for inferring archaeological phenomena. Criticisms of popular HBE approaches, including optimal foraging theory (OFT), challenge the assumption that humans will always maximize their behavior. Thus, these...