ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the idea of the ‘anatomically modern human’, the pivot around which all these other notions revolve, is an analytic fiction whose principal function is to cover up a contradiction at the heart of modern evolutionary biology. What separates the anatomically modern humans of thirty thousand years ago from their contemporary descendants, according to orthodox theory, is a process not of evolution but of history – or as some would have it, of cultural rather than biological evolution. In order to explain how change can occur in the absence of significant genetic modification, orthodox evolutionary theory has had to conceive of a ‘second track’, of culture history, superimposed upon the baseline of an evolved genotypic heritage. The chapter also argues that the distinction between evolution and history, as set out in the orthodox view, cannot be sustained.
