Blurring the biological and social in human becomings

TL;DRAbstract

Generally, evolutionary approaches to understanding humanity focus on the fossil record, on biological influences on human behaviour, or on human biological development. Equally, many social anthropologists focus on stories and experiences of being human and the trajectories and contexts of our lives as social symbolic creatures. Recently, there has been an increasing integration of perspectives that destabilize such boundaries and that focus, emphatically, on the myriad processes of becoming human, rather than on the state of being human (Dunbar et al. 2010, Ingold 2011, Jeeves 2011, Sussman and Cloninger 2011, Fuentes 2012). Bypassing the conceptualization of the biological and social as distinct domains of being, and thinking of them rather as intertwined processes of becoming, presents a powerful approach for anthropology. Specifically, I suggest that we need to adopt an integrative biosocial approach in order to evaluate the evolution of various human patterns (Ingold 1996, 2000,

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