Evolution And History

xxvi Preface

emergence of cities and states (Chapter 11). These chapters

include material on the linguistic capabilities of apes, the

emergence of human language, and the origin of writing.

In addition, every chapter includes a Biocultural Connec-

tion feature to further illustrate the interplay of biological

and cultural processes in shaping the human experience.

Unifying Themes

In our own teaching, we have come to recognize the value

of marking out unifying themes that help students see the

big picture as they grapple with the vast array of material

involved with the study of human beings. In Evolution and

Prehistory we employ three such themes:

1. We present anthropology as a study of humankind’s
   responses through time to the fundamental chal-
   lenges of survival. Each chapter is framed by this
   theme, opening with a Challenge Issue paragraph
   and photograph and ending with Questions for Re-
   flection tied to that particular challenge.


2. We emphasize the integration of human culture and
   biology in the steps humans take to meet these chal-
   lenges. The Biocultural Connection theme appears
   throughout the text—as a thread in the main narra-
   tive and in a boxed feature that highlights this con-
   nection with a topical example for each chapter.


3. We track the emergence of globalization and its
   disparate impact on various peoples and cultures
   around the world. While European colonization was
   a global force for centuries—leaving a significant,
   often devastating, footprint on the affected peoples
   in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—decolonization
   began about 200 years ago and became a worldwide
   wave in the mid-1900s. Since the 1960s, however,
   political and economic hegemony has taken a new
   and fast-paced form—namely, glob alization (in
   many ways a concept that expands or builds on
   imperialism). Attention to both forms of global
   domination—colonialism and globalization—runs
   through Evolution and Prehistory, in our treatment
   of specific topics such as primate habitat destruction,
   ownership of the past, and the social distribution of
   health and disease.

Pedagogy

Evolution and Prehistory features a range of learning aids,

in addition to the three unifying themes described above.

Each pedagogical piece plays an important role in the

learning process—from clarifying and enlivening the ma-

terial to revealing relevancy and aiding recall.

the famous poet T. S. Eliot, “the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started and know the place for

the first time” (Four Quartets).

There has never been as great a need for students to

acquire the anthropological tools to help them escape

culture-bound ways of thinking and acting and to gain

more tolerance for other ways of life. Thus we have written

this text, in large part, to help students make sense of our

increasingly complex world and to navigate through its

interrelated biological and cultural networks with knowl-

edge and skill, whatever professional path they take. We

see the book as a guide for people entering the often be-

wildering maze of global crossroads in the 21st century.

A Distinctive Approach

Two key factors distinguish Evolution and Prehistory from

other introductory anthropology texts: our integrative

presentation of the discipline’s four fields and a trio of uni-

fying themes that tie the book together.

Integration of the Four Fields

Unlike traditional texts that present anthropology’s four

fields—archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and

physical anthropology—as if they were relatively separate

or independent, our book takes an integrative approach.

This reflects the comprehensive character of our discipline,

a domain of knowledge where members of our species are

studied in their totality—as social creatures biologically

evolved with the inherent capacity of learning and sharing

culture by means of symbolic communication. This ap-

proach also reflects our collective experience as practicing

anthropologists who recognize that we cannot fully under-

stand humanity in all its fascinating complexity unless we

appreciate the systemic interplay among environmental,

physiological, material, social, ideological, psychological,

and symbolic factors, both past and present.

For analytical purposes, of course, we have no choice

but to discuss physical anthropology as distinct from ar-

chaeology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology.

Accordingly, this text focuses primarily on biological an-

thropology and archaeology, but the links between biol-

ogy and culture, past and present, are shown repeatedly.

Among many examples of this integrative approach,

Chapter 12, “Modern Human Diversity: Race and Rac-

ism,” discusses the social context of “race” and recent cul-

tural practices that have impacted the human genome.

Similarly, material concerning linguistics appears not only

in the chapter on living primates (Chapter 3), but also in

the chapters on primate behavior (Chapter 4), on early

Homo and the origins of culture (Chapter 8), and on the

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