Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. In: Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Editor, Oxford University Press (2003) Pp. xi+794. Price $50.00 paper.

The neolithic transition and the genetics of populations in Europe

Introduction.- The First Vertebrates, Jawless Fishes, the Agnathans.- The Earliest Jawed Vertebrates, the Gnathostomes.- Evolution of Modern Fishes: Critical Biological Innovations.- Tetrapods and the Invasion of Land.- Crucial Vertebrate Innovations.- The Dinosaur Integument.- Mammal-like Reptiles.- Reptiles Return to the Sea.

Origin and evolution

PROP. MURDOCK, of Yale University, has made an admirable translation of Lippert's “Kul-turgeschichte der Menschheit in ihrem organischen Aufbau”(1886–87), which together with his other writings, gained for the author the reputation in Germany of being in the front rank of sociologists, though his work has scarcely had due recognition in other countries. At that time trustworthy data on the ethnography of backward peoples were very scanty and incomplete, so it is not surprising that occasionally his imagination led him beyond his facts and that he was inclined to read too much into them. Such faults are characteristic of most pioneers, but Lippert consciously strove to be inductive, as is shown by his use of the method of comparative ethnology. His approach was distinctly evolutionary, as was almost inevitable at that time, and he covered, so far as he could, the whole field of social anthropology with a due regard to balance and perspective. He did not, however, make the common mistake of confusing evolution with progress. Although Lippert says that “human ingenuity has striven in different places to achieve the goal set by the care for life with the elements there at hand”(p. 169), he does not ignore diffusion from a single centre in the case of the bow (p. 180) and claims it for the fire cult (p. 584) and for the origin of grape wine (p. 199), but in his time the conception of the diffusion of cultures had not achieved the importance which it has now attained. The Evolution of Culture. By Julius Lippert. Translated and edited by Prof. George Peter Murdock. Pp. xxxiii + 716. (London: George Alien and Unwin, Ltd., 1931.) 20s. net.

The Evolution of Culture

AbstractPROF. GORDON CHILDE has a sense of perspective in time, which has been developed to a degree exceptional even among archaeologists, who juggle with millennia; and he is little more restricted in space, for he ranges from the north of Scotland to the Valley of the Indus with a familiarity which few may emulate. He is, therefore, in a position to recommend with confidence the study of archaeology as an antidote to those modern pessimists, who are disposed to doubt the soundness of the foundations upon which the belief in ‘progress', inherited from the late nineteenth century, takes its stand. Neither ‘age’, nor century, he argues, and equally no single area marked out by geographical or national limitations, can afford material adequate for such a judgment. The impartial inquirer must survey all time, and take the whole world as his province, before he ventures to pronounce upon the trend of events in present-day civilization .Man makes Himself
 By V. Gordon Childe. (The Library of Science and Culture.) Pp. xii + 275. (London: Watts and Co., 1936.) 7s. 6d. net.

"Man Makes Himself" by

https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=hum_sci_anthropology_etds

Jenna M. Battillo

Papers

Supplementing Maize Agriculture in Basketmaker II Subsistence: Dietary Analysis of Human Paleofeces from Turkey Pen Ruin (42SA3714)