ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by evolutionary theories of culture in nineteenth-century anthropology. Those who are casually acquainted with the history of anthropology assume that the first self-identified anthropologists-Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan-were directly influenced by Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. But we’ve already seen that the Enlightenment thinkers developed social evolutionary ideas nearly 100 years before Origin. And the terminology used by Enlightenment philosophers such as Ferguson, who argued that cultures evolve through savagery, barbarism to civilization, is no different from that of the first evolutionary anthropologists. So clearly the first anthropologists did not draw their inspiration from Charles Darwin, however highly they thought of his work.
