ABSTRACT

Anthropologists have long been familiar with what Stephen Jay Gould calls “punctuated equilibrium.” The theory of punctuated equilibrium challenged the long-standing idea that evolution was a long, slow, gradual process resulting in the manifestation of changes in all living species based on natural selection acting on their respective gene pools over geological time. Punctuated equilibrium postulates long periods of stability with very little change marked by the sudden introduction of rapid change based on discontinuities caused by dramatic environmental shifts, mutations acting on the gene pool, and other similar forces. These radical changes spark selection of traits and attributes of populations in a dramatic fashion, far faster than the gradual evolutionary changes originally postulated by Charles Darwin. The point is that punctuated equilibrium is characterized by very rapid evolutionary change. In geological time, this would have taken place over millions of years, minimally hundreds of thousands of years; but as you know, this is a very very short time in evolutionary terms.