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A great question remains unresolved: What is man? The limits of the Eurocentric techno-scientific worldview, and its theories and models of human nature are examined. An intellectual paralysis prevents progress in the examination of this issue. This paper presents a worldview committed to a specifically human biology that transcends the shortcomings of neo-Darwinian theory. We propose a theory of the essential elements that would allow us to advance in the study of what makes us human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with 'global' visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label 'globalization' generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on 'the global' within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]