- What is theory for?
- Who is theory for?: The social relevance of a critical approach to archaeology
- Theory in the Field
- Archaeological Theories and Archaeological Sciences
- Words and Things: Technology and Belief
- Theory in the Public Eye: Archaeology and the Moving Image in Britain
- Colonial and Post-colonial Archaeologies
- Evolutionary Archaeologies
- Marxist Archaeologies
- Emerging from Theoretical Anarchy in Anthropological Archaeology
- Structuralism and its Archaeological Legacy
- Postmodern Archaeologies
- Becoming Human
- Time
- Landscape and Environment
- Material Culture
- Signs and Symbols
- Bodies and persons
- On Practice
- Social Organization and Change
- Identity
- Economy and exchange
- Archaeology, Theory, and War-Related Violence: Theoretical Perspectives on the Archaeology of Warfare and Warriorhood
- Empires and Imperialism
- Belief and Ritual
- Positivist and Post-Positivist Philosophy of Science
- Darwinism and its Influences
- Continental Philosophies
- Post-colonial theory
- Evolution, agency, and objects: Rediscovering classical pragmatism
- Feminist archaeologies and gender studies
Abstract and Keywords
<p>Studying human evolution means getting to grips with the fundamental question of what it actually means to be ‘human’. Is humanity best defined by our genes, our physical biology, or our behaviour, or some combination of all three? Multiple lines of evidence are available from a range of disciplines, including archaeogenetics, biological anthropology, and archaeology, but each also has its weaknesses, and different disciplines often work from very different definitions of ‘human’ which are inevitably informed by—and impact on—broader cultural ideas about human nature and origins. This chapter discusses the ways in which archaeologists and anthropologists can integrate these often conflicting perspectives on what humans and our ancestors are, what we do and why, into a coherent account of how and why we ‘became human’.</p>
Keywords: human evolution, Palaeolithic archaeology, biological anthropology, aDNA, socio-ecology, cognition
Fiona Coward is Lecturer in Archaeological Science at Bournemouth University. Her research into the evolution of hominin and human social and cultural lives, and especially the co-evolution of cognition and material culture, has been presented internationally and published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including Science, Journal of Archaeological Science and Cambridge Archaeological Journal as well as in several edited volumes, including Social Brain, Distributed Mind, Approaches in Regional Network Analysis, The Cognitive Life of Things and The Sapient Mind. She is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and from September 2013 she will be Associate Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- What is theory for?
- Who is theory for?: The social relevance of a critical approach to archaeology
- Theory in the Field
- Archaeological Theories and Archaeological Sciences
- Words and Things: Technology and Belief
- Theory in the Public Eye: Archaeology and the Moving Image in Britain
- Colonial and Post-colonial Archaeologies
- Evolutionary Archaeologies
- Marxist Archaeologies
- Emerging from Theoretical Anarchy in Anthropological Archaeology
- Structuralism and its Archaeological Legacy
- Postmodern Archaeologies
- Becoming Human
- Time
- Landscape and Environment
- Material Culture
- Signs and Symbols
- Bodies and persons
- On Practice
- Social Organization and Change
- Identity
- Economy and exchange
- Archaeology, Theory, and War-Related Violence: Theoretical Perspectives on the Archaeology of Warfare and Warriorhood
- Empires and Imperialism
- Belief and Ritual
- Positivist and Post-Positivist Philosophy of Science
- Darwinism and its Influences
- Continental Philosophies
- Post-colonial theory
- Evolution, agency, and objects: Rediscovering classical pragmatism
- Feminist archaeologies and gender studies