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Deep Time and Evolution
This page follows two programmes that widen history’s frame beyond the written record, and the line, contested since the nineteenth century, over whether the vocabulary of evolution describes cultural change or mistakes it.
Two recent programmes push the subject’s starting line back. Deep history, in Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain (2008) and the collection Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011, edited with Andrew Shryock), rejects the boundary between prehistory and history as an artefact of the written record and asks historians to begin with the species, drawing on archaeology, genetics and neuroscience for the long stretch before writing. Big history, named and taught by [David Christian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Christian_(historian) from 1989 and set out in Maps of Time (2004), goes further back, to the origin of the universe, and organises the whole from the Big Bang to the present as a single narrative of increasing complexity across thresholds. The International Big History Association was founded in 2010 and the Big History Project brought the course to schools from 2011. Both programmes present themselves as a widening of history’s frame; critics within the discipline, among them Sam Wineburg, reply that a history without texts to interpret has become something else, closer to evolutionary science than to the historian’s craft.
The nineteenth century had its own developmental history of humanity in anthropology’s social evolutionism. Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) arranged societies on a single ladder from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, and Herbert Spencer supplied the general law of evolution from homogeneous to heterogeneous that seemed to license it. Franz Boas broke the line. From “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (1896) he argued that the ethnographic record contradicted the stages at almost every point, that each culture is the product of its own history and its contacts, and that the comparative method assumed what it set out to prove; his historical particularism became the founding stance of American anthropology. Evolutionism returned in the mid-century as neo-evolutionism. Leslie White (The Evolution of Culture, 1959) made the energy a society harnesses the measure of its development; Julian Steward proposed a multilinear evolution, in which societies adapt to their environments along several lines rather than one ladder; and Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (Evolution and Culture, 1960) split the difference between general evolution, the rise of complexity across cultures, and specific evolution, the adaptive divergence of each. The later cultural evolution of Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson and Joseph Henrich, building on Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s population models of 1981 and on Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), presents itself as a different thing under a similar name: it models the transmission of cultural traits in populations by the methods of population genetics, with no ladder, no terminus and no ranking of societies. The programme has its own critics. Joseph Fracchia and Richard Lewontin, in “Does Culture Evolve?” (History and Theory, 1999), argued that culture has no analogues of reproduction and selection, that the evolutionary frame lops off the power relations and particularity that explain cultural change, and that cultural change is a historical process to be explained by the histories of groups. Tim Ingold, from Evolution and Social Life (1986), has held that transmission models rest on a division between nature and culture that the growth of skill in a lived environment does not respect. Whether the population models describe history or replace it with something else is where the line now runs.
See also: Philosophy of history (the subject landing) · The Speculative Tradition · The Critical Tradition · Critiques of Progress · Historical Time · Darwinism · Spencer · Boyd · Richerson · Henrich · Lewontin