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Nurturing Our Humanity sheds new light on our personal and social options in today’s world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings—largely overlooked—from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hardwired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right versus left, religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and humans over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socioeconomic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this affects nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today’s ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. However, a more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.

A lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging, this natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands' beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction, evolution, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belonging. The text is built around the stories of four species: the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, the Palila, and the Japanese White-Eye. The book offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, the book argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawaiʻi, and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work.

In recent years, interest in the lives of children in antiquity has flourished, creating many exciting new research opportunities for bioarchaeologists. In this book, the exploration of children’s lives in the past is being addressed on multiple levels and draws from many sub-disciplines. These multi-disciplinary approaches include detailed analyses of growth and ontogeny interpreted through differing biocultural perspectives, complex reconstructions of childhood health and well-being, and rich contextual investigations of social aging and changing identity throughout childhood and adolescence. All of these research streams contribute substantially to our understanding of childhood in the past, but there is often a disconnect between biological and social spheres of research. A central theme of this volume is that future work on the lives of children in antiquity should be built on a strong foundation of biocultural research that draws from, and more successfully integrates, multiple sub-disciplines, including skeletal biology and physiology, archaeology, and socio-cultural anthropology. This deepening of biocultural approaches is essential if we are to study the lives of children in ways that better reflect the complexity of the juvenile period. The end goal is to highlight how diverse research interests can be brought together to enrich our understanding of childhood in the past and particularly to better understand childhood as a dynamic, embodied experience (“lived through” both physically and socially).

This book is an account of half a century of scientific investigation of life and death in three ancient Nubian communities. The research coheres around a single, unifying theme: namely that the evolution and adaptation of human populations, both living and dead, results from a complex interaction between human biology and the cultural and natural environment. This has come to be known as a biocultural approach.Each chapter is a presentation of one aspect of our program of biocultural analysis. The analyses of cranial morphology investigates the relationship changes in the Nubian diet and the evolution of craniofacial anatomy. Our research on infants and children analyzes the relationship between the nutritional and disease environments in which they lived and the manifestation of disease and physiological stress, as evidenced in their bones and teeth including cribra orbitalia and enamel defects. The study of the adults likewise focuses on the diseases and stresses of aging in their cultural setting.Finally, there is a shift in focus from case studies of communities at large to case studies of individuals and the disease conditions afflicting them. Each case is taken from the basics of diagnosis to a consideration of the cultural setting in which these conditions – some of them grievous – ran their course. The book concludes with a discussion of whether studies such as ours give us insight into the lives of these Nubian folk beyond the material aspects of their remains.

In today's world hunter-gatherer societies struggle with seemingly insurmountable problems: deforestation and encroachment, language loss, political domination by surrounding communities. Will they manage to survive? This book is about one such society living in the monsoon rainforests of western Nepal: the Raute. It explores how this elusive ethnic group, the last hunter-gatherers of the Himalayas, maintains its traditional way of life amidst increasing pressure to assimilate. The book examines Raute social strategies of survival as they roam the lower Himalayas gathering wild yams and hunting monkeys. Hunting is part of a symbiotic relationship with local Hindu farmers, who find their livelihoods threatened by the monkeys' raids on their crops. Raute hunting helps the Hindus, who consider the monkeys sacred and are reluctant to kill the animals themselves. The book explores Raute beliefs about living in the forest and the central importance of foraging in their lives. The book discusses Raute identity formation, nomadism, trade relations, and religious beliefs, all of which turn on the foragers' belief in the moral goodness of their unique way of life. It concludes with a review of issues that have long been important to anthropologists—among them, biocultural diversity and the shift from an evolutionary focus on the ideal hunter-gatherer to an interest in hunter-gatherer diversity.

The story of the emergence of modern humanity needs to take account of cultural and biological evolution, as well as the interaction of the two; it must describe a biocultural evolution. Culture and the Course of Human Evolution advances a new model for our emergence from earlier hominins, one that incorporates an innovative view of its cultural aspects. It joins an analysis of culture in its broadest and deepest elements, as they are manifested in nonhuman animals today and were present in our distant ancestors, to the latest approaches to biological evolution. It describes how cultural changes among our ancestors extended the capacities found in many animals to interpret their worlds through signs, and it details how this growing semiotic complexity led to emergent, systematic cultural structures that boosted late hominins beyond the attainments of other animals. These structures in turn entered into the mechanisms of natural selection, forming unprecedented dynamics in them. The model of biocultural evolution described here casts new light on the latest findings of Paleolithic archaeologists, offering a solution to the puzzle that stands at the heart of our deep history: the dramatic growth over the last 250,000 years in the powers of humans to construct their niches, alter their environments, and shift the impact of selective pressures on them.

This book is about the irreducibility of human evolution to purely biological properties and processes, for human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Human evolution over the last few million years has involved the transformation from biological evolution into biocultural evolution. For several million years, human intelligence, dexterity, and technology all coevolved with one another, although the first two are organic properties and the last is inorganic. Over the last few tens of thousands of years, however, the development of new social roles—notably, spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have been combined with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the familiar human species. This leads to a fundamental evolutionary understanding of humans as biocultural ex-apes; reducible neither to an imaginary cultureless biological core nor to our ancestry as apes. Consequently, there can be no “natural history” of the human condition or the human organism that is not a “natural/cultural history.”

The book analyses the emergence of biocultural rights as a sub-set of third generation group rights in environmental law. It argues that these rights, which advocate a people’s duty of stewardship over Nature, have arisen as a response to the world’s ecological crisis. Indeed, the growing discourse about biocultural rights has begun a radical reconfiguration of the dominant notions of property and the juridical subject. The book uses a multipronged approach, relying upon economic, anthropological, political, and legal theories, to deconstruct the current concepts of private property from the perspective of indigenous peoples and traditional communities. It further presents evidence that this discursive shift is gaining formal legal recognition by referring to negotiations of multilateral environmental agreements, judicial decisions of regional and domestic courts, and community initiatives. The book concludes with a description of the new biocultural jurisprudence including its application through innovative, community-developed instruments such as biocultural community protocols.

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era—roughly the period since World War II—as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, this book tells the story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as it decries the overuse and misuse of the term “postmodern,” it shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in modern culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease—an objectively verified disorder—from illness, a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, the book says, can make no such clean distinction; instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways, the book leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.

The conservation of environment and the protection of human rights are two of the most compelling needs of our time. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to combine and too often result in mutual harm. This book analyses the idea of biocultural rights as a proposal for harmonizing the needs of environmental and human rights. These rights, considered as a basket of group rights, are those deemed necessary to protect the stewardship role that certain indigenous peoples and local communities have played towards the environment. With a view to understanding the value and merits, as well as the threats that biocultural rights entail, the book critically assesses their foundations, content, and implications, and develops new perspectives and ideas concerning their potential applicability for promoting the socio-economic interests of indigenous people and local communities. It further explores the controversial relationship of interdependence and conflict between conservation of environment and protection of human rights.

The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on underevidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time in history, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of morality and culture that are informed by evolutionary theory. In addition, the social sciences now provide better information about which social arrangements are feasible and sustainable and about how social norms arise, change, and come to shape moral thought and behavior. Accordingly, it is time to revisit the question of moral progress. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a pessimistic picture, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. In brief, humans are said to be “hard-wired” for rather limited moral capacities. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs; and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress.