Early Human Kinship brings together original studies from leading figures in the biological sciences, social anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics to provide a major breakthrough in the debate over human evolution and the nature of society. A major new collaboration between specialists across the range of the human sciences including evolutionary biology and psychology; social/cultural anthropology; archaeology and linguistics Provides a ground-breaking set of original studies offering a new perspective on early human history Debates fundamental questions about early human society: Was there a connection between the beginnings of language and the beginnings of organized 'kinship and marriage'? How far did evolutionary selection favor gender and generation as principles for regulating social relations? Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in conjunction with the British Academy

The Wrong Ape for Early Human Origins highlights the pervasive impact of the chimpanzee referential model on paleoanthropological theory. This work suggests the need to re-imagine the last common ancestor of chimps and humans based on a more generalized Miocene ape platform and the reliance of early hominins on epigenesis and creative niche construction.

In this book, Hannes Charen presents an alternative examination of kinship structures in political theory. Employing a radically transdisciplinary approach, On the Politics of Kinship is structured in a series of six theoretical vignettes or frames. Each chapter frames a figure, aspect, or relational context of the family or kinship. Some chapters are focused on a critique of the family as a state-sanctioned institution, while others cautiously attempt to recast kinship in a way to reimagine mutual obligation through the generation of kinship practices understood as a perpetually evolving set of relational responses to finitude. In doing so, Charen considers the ways in which kinship is a plastic social response to embodied exposure, both concealed and made more evident in the bloated, feeble, and broken individualities and nationalities that seem to dominate our social and political landscape today. On the Politics of Kinship will be of interest to political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, and social scientists in general.

Situated within the framework of Confucian family-oriented ethics, this book explores the issue of familial partiality and specifically discusses whether it is morally praiseworthy to love one’s family partially. In reviewing the tension between familial partiality and egalitarian impartiality from different perspectives while also drawing on binary metrics to understand the issue – that is, the weak and strong sense of familial partiality in Confucian moral theory – the author carefully discusses the efficacy of three major arguments to justify moral partiality. It is concluded that the tree argument fails to justify moral partiality in Confucianism, the evolutionary argument only justifies moral partiality in the weak sense that we should devote more resources to our family, and the care argument fails to justify moral partiality in the strong sense that family takes priority in any case even at the expense of the principle of justice. Seeking to address the quandary, the author advances an alternative argument based on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of love to interpret Confucian view of partial relationships, holding that partial treatment is assumed in partial relationships. The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in Confucianism, Chinese philosophy, moral philosophy, and comparative philosophy.

Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.

A radical reassessment of the importance of women in East-Central African society during the precolonial period.

Extraordinary changes in patterns of family life—and family law—have dramatically altered the boundaries of parenthood and opened up numerous questions and debates. What is parenthood and why does it matter? How should society define, regulate, and support it? Is parenthood separable from marriage—or couplehood—when society seeks to foster children’s well-being? What is the better model of parenthood from the perspective of child outcomes? Intense disagreements over the definition and future of marriage often rest upon conflicting convictions about parenthood. What Is Parenthood? asks bold and direct questions about parenthood in contemporary society, and it brings together a stellar interdisciplinary group of scholars with widely varying perspectives to investigate them. Editors Linda C. McClain and Daniel Cere facilitate a dynamic conversation between scholars from several disciplines about competing models of parenthood and a sweeping array of topics, including single parenthood, adoption, donor-created families, gay and lesbian parents, transnational parenthood, parentchild attachment, and gender difference and parenthood.

"A deep history of Africa, from 70,000 BCE to 300 CE, that synthesizes the archeological and historical linguistic evidence to tell an integrated global history of the continent. A framing chapter introduces the historical goals and issues of the book, recounting the terrible histories of recent centuries that led to Africa being wrongly treated as a peripheral other in the history of us all. Chapter two, "African Firsts in the History Technology," brings to light the histories of the independent inventions by Africans, living in different regions in the heart of the continent, of ceramic technology, more than 11,000 years ago; of the earliest cotton weaving technology in World History, 7,000-plus years ago; and of the earliest iron smelting, 4,000 or more years ago. Ehret then turns to agricultural innovations between the ninth and seventh millennia BCE, introducing the evidence that shows that Africa helped usher in the "Age of Agricultural Exchange," and was, on the whole, a net exporter of agricultural innovations into Eurasia (including twelve early essential crops, and domesticated donkeys). Chapter four, "Towns and Long-Distance Commerce in Ancient Africa," turns attention to the roles of Africans (particularly the regions of Sudan and the Congo Basin) in the development of new systems for trading over distance, which facilitated an emerging class of merchants, during the second and first millennia BCE. Next, "The Africanity of Ancient Egypt," summarizes the evidence of intensive cultural interaction between the lands several hundred kilometers south of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles in modern-day Sudan all the way north to Middle Egypt. Finally, a closing chapter, "Africa and Africans in Global History," takes up the problem of how to bring what we have learned about 'ancient' Africa integrally into how we tell World History and proposes a new periodization of African and World History over the ages from around 68,000 BCE-when true, fully modern humans all still lived in eastern Africa-down to the first three centuries CE"--