ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the bases for Marx’s agreement and positive valuation of Darwin’s arguments in The Origin of Species and to survey subsequent developments of evolutionary theory. It examines the Marx’s and Engels’s critique of the naturalization of explanations of the social relations of capitalist society and how this critique played out in the historical development of anthropology both here and abroad. In Marx’s day, the empirical evidence for the evolution of human beings was provided by the comparative anatomy of living species. TNeither Marx nor Engels ever questioned that human natural beings were also social beings. Engels linked the emergence of human natural beings with a series of interconnected changes in the corporeal organization of our ancestors that involved bipedalism, changes in the anatomy and dexterity of the hand, expansion and reorganization of the brain, tool-making, language, and the elaboration of culture.
