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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
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The Evolution of Cultural Diversity - A Phylogenetic Approach (Paperback)
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The Evolution of Cultural Diversity - A Phylogenetic Approach (Paperback)
Series: UCL Institute of Archaeology Publications
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Virtually all aspects of human behavior show enormous variation
both within and between cultural groups, including material
culture, social organization and language. Thousands of distinct
cultural groups exist: about 6,000 languages are spoken today, and
it is thought that a far greater number of languages existed in the
past but became extinct. Using a Darwinian approach, this book
seeks to explain this rich cultural variation. There are a number
of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural diversification
might be tree-like, that is phylogenetic: material and non-material
culture is clearly inherited by descendants, there is descent with
modification, and languages appear to be hierarchically related.
There are also a number of theoretical reasons to believe that
cultural evolution is not tree-like: cultural inheritance is not
Mendelian and can indeed be vertical, horizontal or oblique,
evidence of borrowing abounds, cultures are not necessarily
biological populations and can be transient and complex. Here, for
the first time, this title tackles these questions of cultural
evolution empirically and quantitatively, using a range of case
studies from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia and America. A range
of powerful theoretical tools developed in evolutionary biology is
used to test detailed hypotheses about historical patterns and
adaptive functions in cultural evolution. Evidence is amassed from
archaeological, linguist and cultural datasets, from both recent
and historical or pre-historical time periods. A unifying theme is
that the phylogenetic approach is a useful and powerful framework,
both for describing the evolutionary history of these traits, and
also for testing adaptive hypotheses about their evolution and
co-evolution. Contributors include archaeologists, anthropologists,
evolutionary biologists and linguists, and this book will be of
great interest to all those involved in these areas.
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