How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies -- Preface and Chapter 1

Abstract

The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.