Reviewed by: Human Biology and History Michael A. Little (bio) Human Biology and History, M. Smith, ed. Society for the Study of Human Biology Series 42. London: Taylor & Francis, 2002. xvi + 219 pp. $102 (cloth). Human Biology and History is a collection of papers from a Society for the Study of Human Biology symposium on human biology and history that was held at University College, Durham, England. The purpose of the collection is to integrate the field of human biology and history by applying human biology methods and theory to hypotheses that can be tested with historical data or documents. This is not a new idea in human biology, but it is one generating considerable interest among human biologists and anthropologists. Human Biology in the Archives (Herring and Swedlund 2003) applies some of these same approaches, and the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records, or CoPAR (Silverman and Parezo 1995), is a relatively new organization dedicated to the preservation of archival materials that can be used for research and historical documentation. The Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/) is active in supporting the archival deposition of documents that can be used for historical research in anthropology and human biology. Human Biology and History consists of 10 chapters in which data are drawn from either historical documents (text or measurements) or human skeletal remains. Following an introduction by the editor, John Landers's chapter, "Adaptation and the English Demographic Regime," is a complex analysis that deals with relationships between demographic variables (fertility, mortality, migration), economic conditions, and human health status from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Criteria for adaptation are both Malthusian (per capita output and standard of living) and Darwinian (population increase) and are at both the micro-level (individual well-being) and the macro-level (population growth). Population growth, urbanism, fertility and mortality, and economic changes throughout this 300-year period are analyzed with a high degree of demographic and economic sophistication. "British Polygyny," by Laura Betzig, is a lengthy history of British polygyny in which Betzig documents the changes in "illegitimate fertility" in the literature from roughly Elizabethan I to Elizabethan II times. The work is a superb example of historical scholarship with a behavioral evolutionary perspective, but it might have benefited from a little editing, because some sections stray from the British setting. The polygyny about which Betzig speaks is of males and their power over subordinates, or the power that noble, aristocratic, and [End Page 317] wealthy men have had over subordinate young women. In Betzig's words: "They married monogamously. . . . But they mated polygynously: that is, they had sex with as many women as they could afford" (p. 85). Betzig concludes that the decline in British polygyny resulted from democracy and the loss of power as a means to sex. James Mielke's chapter, "Warfare and Population Structure," chronicles the effects of the 1808-1809 war between the Swedish and Russians on the Aåland Island archipelago population. Lutheran parish data on burials (deaths), marriages, and baptisms (births) and census documentation provide dramatic records of the impact of warfare. For example, deaths among soldiers were minor compared with deaths among the civilian population from dysentery, typhoid, and typhus. Population declined (deaths and deficiency in births and lower fertility) by 13% during the period of warfare and did not recover its numbers for 20 years. An important conclusion is that warfare-associated mortality and reduced fertility have had permanent effects on the genetic structure of the Aåland Islanders, particularly in population genetic distribution and heterogeneity. This may have occurred through increased genetic drift and inbreeding. Malcolm Smith's chapter, "Isonymy Analysis," outlines the "potential for application of quantitative analysis of surname distributions to problems in historical research" (p. 113). The theory behind isonymy application to population genetics is conceptually complex, so Smith's chapter may not be the best introduction. However, some interesting ideas are presented here. Following an excellent review of earlier work by, among others, James Crow and Gabriel Lasker and a discussion of theoretical bases for the kinship and genetic analyses, Lasker's coefficient of relationship by isonymy (Ri) is applied to two case studies...