Trees, thickets, or something in between? Recent theoretical and empirical work in cultural phylogeny

Abstract

Anthropology has always had as one of its goals the explanation of human cultural diversity across space and through time. Over the past several decades, there has been a growing appreciation among anthropologists and other social scientists that the phylogenetic approaches that biologists have developed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of species are useful tools for building and explaining patterns of human diversity. Phylogenetic methods offer a means of creating testable propositions of heritable continuity – how one thing is related to another in terms of descent. Such methods have now been applied to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including languages, projectile points, textiles, marital customs, and political organization. Here we discuss several cultural phylogenies and demonstrate how they were used to address long-standing anthropological issues. Even keeping in mind that phylogenetic trees are nothing more than hypotheses about evolutionary relationships, some researchers have argued that when it comes to cultural behaviors and their products, tree building is theoretically unwarranted. We examine the issues that critics raise and find that they in no way sound the death knell for cultural phylogenetic work.

Keywords:

• cultural phylogeny
• language evolution
• phylogenetic analysis
• phylogenetic inference
• reticulation

Acknowledgements

We thank Reut Berger-Tal for asking us to be a part of this special issue of the Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution, and two reviewers whose comments greatly strengthened our presentation and argument.

Notes

1. This may not have been the first migration through the region. Jinam et al. (2012) postulate an “early train” migration originating from Indochina or South china around the late Pleistocene to early Holocene period, ca. 30,000–10,000 B.P.

2. PAUP* is a program built on maximum parsimony. Gray and Jordan (2000) used it in their study of the colonization of the Pacific by Austronesian-speaking people, but in an updated and expanded study, Gray et al. (2009) used BayesPhylogenies (Pagel & Meade 2004, 2005) to work around limitations of the earlier data and methods.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael J. O’Brien

Michael J. O'Brien is professor of anthropology and dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri.

Mark Collard

Mark Collard is Canada Research Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies and professor of archaeology in the Human Evolutionary Studies Program and the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University.

Briggs Buchanan

Briggs Buchanan is currently a postdoctoral fellow jointly in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri and the Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. He will join the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa in January 2014.

Matthew T. Boulanger

Matthew T. Boulanger is a senior research specialist in the Archaeometry Laboratory at the Missouri University Research Reactor and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri.