Search

The author reflects on the possibility of Neanderthals as a closest living relative of human being in evolutionary genetics. He cites on the comparison between a breakthrough in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of 38,000-year-old Neanderthal and 400 odd bases of mitochondrial DNA. The modern humans and the so-called species have an average divergence time for nuclear genes between 1015 and 465 kiloyears.

The abundant evidence that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years, and dispersed across the world only within the past 100,000 years, provides us with a strong framework in which to consider the evolution of human diversity. While there is evidence that the human capacity for culture has a deeper history, going beyond the origin of the hominin clade, the tendency for humans to form cultures as part of being distinct communities and populations changed markedly with the evolution of H. sapiens. In this paper, we investigate 'cultures' as opposed to 'culture', and the question of how and why, compared to biological diversity, human communities and populations are so culturally diverse. We consider the way in which the diversity of human cultures has developed since 100,000 years ago, and how its rate was subject to environmental factors. We argue that the causes of this diversity lie in the distribution of resources and the way in which human communities reproduce over several generations, leading to fissioning of kin groups. We discuss the consequences of boundary formation through culture in their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts.