Stephen Shennan

Bio: Stephen Shennan is an academic researcher from University College London. The author has contributed to research in topics: Population & Prehistory. The author has an hindex of 52, co-authored 192 publications receiving 10207 citations. Previous affiliations of Stephen Shennan include Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution

Abstract: © Oxford University Press, 2007. All rights reserved. This article demonstrates the role of evolutionary approaches in archaeology by focusing on four different topics that have long been of interest to archaeologists of virtually all theoretical persuasions. It examines how evolutionary theory can be used by presenting specific concrete examples. The four topics concern different but interrelated histories: of foraging adaptations, human populations, social institutions, and patterns in culture. Addressing these topics on the basis of archaeological data from an evolutionary point of view involves making use of several different strands from the range of complementary and sometimes conflicting evolutionary approaches to understanding human behaviour. There is a major distinction within evolutionary approaches to human behaviour between human behavioural ecology and those viewpoints that attach a significant role to culture, in particular, dual-inheritance theory.

Revolution Fulfilled? Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, a Generation On. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, edited by Ian Hodder. (New Directions in Archaeology Series.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 (2nd edition); ISBN-13: 9780521035507 paperback, £18.99 & US$34.99, 196 pp.

Abstract: It is now 25 years since Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (henceforth SSA) was first published in 1982. Why run a review feature upon a book this old? Clearly not to let readers know about its now-familiar contents. One justification is historical. Very few works have had such an effect — in archaeology, the nearest parallel comes with works such as Binford and Binford's New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968, which laid the basis for an entire agenda of New Archaeology. Like Binford and Binford's book, SSA marked a transformation of archaeology as much as, or more than, it actually transformed the field itself. It signalled the coming of age of a coherent cohort of young, energetic scholars with a strongly defined new agenda. It breached taken-for-granted limits with bold, even flagrant ambition; it consciously invoked new intellectual frames. As much as any particular publishing event can punctuate the scholarly process with the intimation of a new direction, the publication of SSA did so.And yet, a review feature on the book would perhaps not be entirely justified as purely a historical retrospective. It is clear from the trajectory of theoretical publication in Britain (and to some extent America) over the last decades, from the content of archaeological theory courses in universities, and the vocabulary bounced around at conferences such as TAG and the SAAs, that the agenda of SSA — often termed ‘post-processualism’ — has become the dominant voice in mainstream archaeological theory. The challenger has become the establishment; the once-unthinkable has become normal science. There are many other theoretical voices, of course, but even self-proclaimed alternative movements show signs of having absorbed, osmotically, much of the theoretical agenda set by post-processualism, even if their answers differ.Twenty-five is a human generation, and perhaps the closest approach to eternity in the rapidly fermenting world of theory; the current generation of students (future colleagues, really) will have known no other paradigm. Hence, we have asked our contributors not only to comment retrospectively upon the book itself, but also prospectively, on how well its agenda has weathered the years, on what roads remain untaken, and upon where they think the future might lie.

The Web of Human Sexual Contacts

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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.