Watkins Trevor
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG, UK.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2017 Aug 14;39(3):22. doi: 10.1007/s40656-017-0152-3.
In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical vocabularies, so that their accounts are written in mutually incompatible languages. In recent years social, cognitive and cultural evolutionary theories, building on a growing body of archaeological evidence, have made substantial sense of the social and cultural evolution of the genus Homo. However, specialists in this field of studies have found it difficult to extend their kind of analysis into the Holocene human world. Within southwest Asia the three or four millennia of the Neolithic period at the beginning of the Holocene represents a pivotal point, which saw the transformation of human society in the emergence of the first large-scale, permanent communities, the domestication of plants and animals, and the establishment of effective farming economies. Following the Neolithic, the pace of human social, economic and cultural evolution continued to increase. By 5000 years ago, in parts of southwest Asia and northeast Africa there were very large-scale urban societies, and the first large-scale states (kingdoms). An extension of cultural niche construction theory enables us to extend the evolutionary narrative of the Pleistocene into the Holocene, opening the way to developing a single, long-term, evolutionary account of human history.
在本文中，我试图展示文化生态位构建理论如何有潜力将人类进化故事从更新世延伸至新石器时代，进而延伸至我们如今生活的这种超大规模社会。对人类过去的研究已被划分成不同部分，每个部分使用不同的分析词汇，以至于它们的描述是用相互不兼容的语言写成的。近年来，基于越来越多的考古证据，社会、认知和文化进化理论对人属的社会和文化进化有了相当深刻的理解。然而，该研究领域的专家发现很难将他们的那种分析扩展到全新世的人类世界。在西南亚，全新世开始时的新石器时代的三、四千年代表了一个关键点，在此期间人类社会发生了转变，出现了第一批大规模的永久社区，动植物被驯化，有效的农耕经济得以确立。新石器时代之后，人类社会、经济和文化进化的步伐继续加快。到5000年前，在西南亚部分地区和东北非出现了超大规模的城市社会以及第一批大规模国家（王国）。文化生态位构建理论的扩展使我们能够将更新世的进化叙事延伸到全新世，为发展一个单一的、长期的人类历史进化描述开辟道路。
