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Human Evolution: Multiregional Origins

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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Introduction

Understanding human phylogeny has always been contentious. For more than a century after Darwin, human phylogeny usually reflected current racial taxonomy. Through the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, most paleoanthropologists and paleontologists were evolutionary polygenists who essentially described human races (=subspecies) as having independently evolved from different primate species, some ancient and others more recently (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997). In the twentieth century, evolutionary polygenism had come to focus on the independent evolution of human races (=subspecies) from a single prehuman hominid ancestor. The key element all variations of evolutionary polygenism had in common was the independent evolution of human races for so long that the races acquired their humanity separately (Wolpoff and Caspari 2000).

Even in its heyday evolutionary polygenism was not accepted by all paleoanthropologists, and after the end of the Second World War,...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Milford H. Wolpoff

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  1. Milford H. Wolpoff
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Correspondence to Milford H. Wolpoff .

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  1. College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Wolpoff, M.H. (2020). Human Evolution: Multiregional Origins. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_672

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