Paper short abstract:

The social anthropology/evolutionary sciences gap is wide. However, some current approaches to the human past do allow 'space' for the growth of a shared cultural domain, including the production of artifacts. I refer to the project 'From Lucy to Language'.

Paper long abstract:

Explanatory concepts from evolutionary biology of a kind once ridiculed by social anthropologists are now applied in a sober way to human behaviour. The advance of the biological/genetic sciences has required that their claims be taken seriously by social anthropology.

One important idea focuses on the link between increasing brain size and increasing population group sizes, the one providing selective advantage for the other (see for example Robin Dunbar's The Human Story, 2004). Intentionality, language, and all that went with such emergent properties of 'the human brain' were an advantage to group survival in that individuals could liaise, communicate, second-guess and even try control each other in the face of external challenges from the material environment or from rivals.

From the point of view of social anthropology, this approach risks of course a certain circularity. However, it does allow 'space' for the growth of a shared cultural domain, including the skilled social production of artifacts, in a way that earlier evolutionary approaches rarely did. It is paving the way for new conversations between the biological and socio-cultural side of both anthropology and archaeology. This paper pursues these questions with particular reference to the British Academy's ongoing Centenary Project, 'From Lucy to Language: the Archaeology of the Social Brain'.