The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior.

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents $\alpha \approx 2.4$ for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.

The Web of Human Sexual Contacts

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ∼8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ∼24,000-year-old Siberian. By ∼6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ∼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ∼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ∼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

This article evaluates theories of the origins of sex differences in human behavior. It reviews the cross-cultural evidence on the behavior of women and men in nonindustrial societies, especially the activities that contribute to the sex-typed division of labor and patriarchy. To explain the cross-cultural findings, the authors consider social constructionism, evolutionary psychology, and their own biosocial theory. Supporting the biosocial analysis, sex differences derive from the interaction between the physical specialization of the sexes, especially female reproductive capacity, and the economic and social structural aspects of societies. This biosocial approach treats the psychological attributes of women and men as emergent given the evolved characteristics of the sexes, their developmental experiences, and their situated activity in society.

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A cross-cultural analysis of the behavior of women and men: implications for the origins of sex differences.

Understanding the introduction of farming and the adoption of Neolithic culture continues to be a major research objective in Europe. The authors make use of a new database of radiocarbon dates from Mesolithic and Neolithic sites to map the transition. While the overall effect is still a diffusion into Europe from the south-east, detailed spatial analysis reveals fascinating local variations: in some places change was rapid, and one population replaced another, in others it was gradual and owed to incoming ideas rather than people.

/pdf/neolithic-transition-in-europe-the-radiocarbon-record-1g5lmiq6c9.pdf

Neolithic transition in Europe: the radiocarbon record revisited

Following on the work of Dunnell, the evolutionary archaeology school has made a sharp distinction between functional and stylistic variation in archaeological artifacts. Variation is defined as functional if it is affected by selection processes and as stylistic if it is a result of processes of random drift. The argument has been further developed by Neiman (1995), who showed by simulation that processes of cultural mutation and drift could produce the kinds of battleship curves that generally characterize artifact-style frequency distributions through time, and also demonstrated that they could account for patterns of stylistic variation through time in Woodland-period ceramic assemblages from Illinois. In this paper we present a case study of change in the decoration of pottery from early Neolithic Central Europe. We show that the actual diachronic frequency distributions and those expected under the neutral model do not coincide and conclude that in this case the neutral model does not provide an adequate description of change in ceramic decoration. A model involving selection, in the form of a bias in favor of novelty in the later phases of the period studied, seems likely to be more appropriate, and we note the social interpretation of the original investigator of the data. In conclusion, it is suggested that neutral models provide an important heuristic tool but that there is not a radical break between functional and stylistic variation.

Ceramic Style Change and Neutral Evolution: A Case Study from Neolithic Europe

List of contributors Foreword Introduction: archaeolgical appraoches to cultural identity Objectivity, Interests and Cultural Difference in Archaeological Interpretation 1. Ethnic concepts in German prehistory: a case study on the relationship between cultural identity and archaelogical objectivity 2. The Vandals: myths and facts about a Germanic tribe of the first half of the 1st millennium AD 3. Theory, profession, and the political role of archaeolgy 4. An epistemological enquiry into some archaeological and historical interpretations of 17th century native American-European relations 5. Matters of fact and matters of interest 6. The role of 'local knowledge' in archaeological interpretation Cultural Identity and its Material Expression in the Past and the Present 7. Material aspects of Limba, Yalunka and Kuranko ethnicity: archaeological research in northeastern Sierra-Leone 8. Multiculturalism in the eastern Andes 9. The property of symmetry and the concept of ethnic style 10. Patterns of learning, residence and descent among potters in Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico 11. Some ethnospecific features in central and eastern European archaeology during the early Middle Ages: the case of Avars and Hungarians 12. Ancient ethnic groups as represented on bronzes from Yunnan, China 13. The archaeology of the Yoruba: problems and possibilities 14. Ethnicity and traditions in Mesolithic mortuary practices of southern Scandinavia 15. Detecting political units in archaeology - an Iron Age example The Genesis, Maintenance and Disappearance of Ethnicity and Cultural Variation 17. Sociocultural and economic elements of the adaptation systems of the Argentine Toba: the Nacilamolek and Taksek cases of Formosa Province 18. Spatial heterogeneity in Fuego-Patagonia 19. Cultural and ethnic processes in prehistory as seen through the evidence of archaeology and related disciplines 20. Research with style: a case study from Australian rock art 21. Steppe traditions and cultural assimilation of a nomadic people: the Cumanians in Hungary in the 13th-14th century 22. An ethnic change or a socio-economic one? The 5th and 6th centuries Index

Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity

https://www.sfu.ca/~mcollard/documents/Collard_et_al_2006.pdf

Branching, blending, and the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations

The emergence of a hereditary elite class in Bronze Age Europe is now widely interpreted in terms of the redistributive activities of a managerial ruling class. This fuctionalist account of elite origins goes against a uniformitarian understanding of what ruling classes do in complex societies. It also is poorly suited to the concrete evidence for Bronze Age cultures in Europe. The rise of hereditary, superordinate social strata in prehistoric Europe is better understood as a consequence of the development of capital-intensive subsistence techniques. Plow agriculture, Mediterranean polyculture, irrigation, and offshore fishing limited the possibility of group fission and thereby gave leaders the opportunity to exploit basic producers over the long term. The observations that capital-intensification preceded elite emergence and that areas with greater intensification exhibited greater social inequalities confirm this nonfuctionalist account of the development of stratification in later prehistoric Europe.

Stephen Shennan

Papers

Neolithic transition in Europe: the radiocarbon record revisited

Ceramic Style Change and Neutral Evolution: A Case Study from Neolithic Europe

Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity

Branching, blending, and the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations

The Development of Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe [and Comments and Reply]