This
course will be a general survey course of evolutionary anthropology with a
special focus on the behavioral aspect, both as a sub-discipline of
anthropology and as an interdisciplinary research program that combines
insights from biology, psychology, economics and history to make sense of human
behavior and culture. Rather than opposing ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ explanations,
this course will layout a framework that illuminates learning and culture
within a broad evolutionary framework that will permit us to explore kinship,
food preferences (sugar, salt, etc.), incest, altruism, sex differences, social
status, homicide, and religion. Using a comparative approach, we will
contextualize human behavior by examining both studies of non-human primates,
especially chimpanzees, as well as the full breadth of human diversity,
including both ethnographic and experimental data from hunter-gatherers,
herders and agriculturalists and—the most unusual of all—people from
industrialized societies. We also consider how cultural evolution has shaped
our genetic evolution, both over our species evolutionary history and in more
recent millennia.
