Introduction

The initial impetus for this book on the evolution of hominid culture and social systems has come from archaeologists. Milford Wolpoff (1994:179) has suggested that ‘archaeologists have become more concerned with the evolution of human behaviour than have biological anthropologists’. While the strong representation of biological anthropologists among the contributors belies this contention, it is also true that some social scientists currently seeking to ground their understanding of human social agency in a Darwinian framework are impatient with the laborious process of data-gathering and the niceties of data interpretation which characterize Palaeolithic archaeology. The ‘evolutionary psychology’ programme of Cosmides, Tooby and their collaborators (Barkow et al. 1992), which grounds human cognitive biases in the adaptive context of the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness’, has developed free of any commitment to testing the validity of models of the EEA against archaeological evidence. Even Dunbar, whose ethological models of human conversational language use have given research on language origins such a new lease of life, has demonstrated this impatience, remarking of his group size model:

That it may prove difficult to test such predictions from the archaeological record…is bad luck for the archaeologists, but is neither here nor there for my argument. At best, it affects one element in the story (and one that, from an evolutionary point of view, is the least interesting: the timing of a phenotypic change is only interesting in determining who might and who might not have inherited a particular character from a common ancestor).