ABSTRACT
[Abstract: In contrast to the biological sciences, anthropology and the social sciences more generally are strongly influenced by two very different ways of understanding and studying evolution. The oldest of these is the progressivist perspective developed by H. Spencer, L. H. Morgan, and others, and carried forward in various forms through the present day. These scholars and their intellectual descendants saw evolution as a cumulative process, resulting in the “improvement” of organisms and societies. While this sort of progressivism was abandoned by researchers following a Darwinian paradigm more than a century ago, it remains implicit in many of the intellectual tools that we use to study human evolution. Undesirable legacies of progressivist evolutionary thinking include widely used stage systems such as Lower/Middle/Upper Palaeolithic, punctuation of evolutionary sequences by so-called milestones, and many conventional approaches to reconstructing the behaviour of extinct forms of human. This chapter proposes ways to minimize or avoid these undesirable legacies. It also discusses some of the intellectual challenges of dealing with a fragmented and incomplete Pleistocene archaeological record.]
