Evoluzione Culturale: una prospettiva quantitativa sui processi di trasmissione della cultura

Eugenio Bortolini

Dipartimento di Beni Culturali
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Contributo presentato da Antonio C. D. Panaino

Abstract

The Theory of Cultural Evolution is a critical approach to understand the development of our species, Homo sapiens, as it explicitly frames this process as coin with two inseparable and intertwined sides – one for biological change and one for cultural change. While this dual perspective has been demonstrably impactful in various fields, including anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and economics, it remains surprisingly overlooked and underrepresented, particularly in the Italian academic context. Despite its significant contributions to the theoretical and methodological advancements in these disciplines, the relative marginalization of this approach highlights the challenges interdisciplinary perspectives often face when attempting to penetrate more specialized academic fields. This paper seeks to provide a brief (and necessarily non-exhaustive) introduction to this approach, with the hope that its wider dissemination may promote greater integration of this innovative framework into various disciplines, with a particular focus on the study of the evolutionary journey of our species, from its African origins to the present day.

Keywords

Cultural Evolution, Biocultural change, Cultural Transmission, Quantitative approaches, Human past.

© Eugenio Bortolini, 2024 / Doi: 10.30682/annalesm2402g

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license