Introduction

Over the past century, scientific and philosophical explorations of human origins, though rooted firmly in biology, have been increasingly concerned with humanity’s social nature. In stark contrast to other areas of the life sciences, the study of human evolution cannot ignore the social context and the cultural domain of values and ideas — ideas which have acted in concert with natural selection to give rise to the self-reflecting species known as Homo sapiens sapiens. Perspectives on human evolution in particular and science in general are themselves subject to an intellectual heritage that both molds and is molded by a given temporal and spatial ordering of social and historical events.