Unilinear Theory Of Cultural Evolution

Cultural evolution also known as socio-cultural evolution is the development of one or various cultures from the simplest ones to the most complex ones. The topic can be regarded as a unilinear aspect that characterizes the evolution of human behavior altogether, or it can be regarded as a multilinear aspect, in which case, it defines the cultures of societies.

Unilinear cultural evolution was a vital concept in the rising field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries, but differs, in the early 20th century. Scholars started to multiply theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist views continue in many modes, anthropology that target on the development with time.

Unilinear theory

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For example in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progres de l’esprit humain (1975: sketch for a Historical picture of the progress of Human Mind), the Marquis de Condorcet, listed to stages, of cultural evolution. He considered that the ultimate era had started with the French Revolution and was intended to escort in universal human rights and the quality of human race. The Danish archaeologist Christian Jurgenson Thomsen is largely accountable as the prime scholar to have focused on such typology on firm data instead than opinion. In Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836, A Guide to Northern Antiques), he classified ancient European communities on the basis of their tools, calling stages the stone, Bronze and iron ages.

In later 19th century, theories of cultural evolution were massively influenced by the large agreement of the theory of biological evolution put forward by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species(1859). Social scientists discovered that the plan proposed by biological evolution, proposed an attractive remedy to their questions, regarding the origins and progress of social behavior. Certainly the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that was taken by various anthropologists and sociologists and that continued in some quarters even into the 20th

It follows that the history and experience of the American Indian tribes represent, more or less nearly, the history and experience of our own remote ancestors when in corresponding conditions.

This passage is from Morgan’s masterwork, Ancient society (1877) in which, he also explained seven stages of cultural evolution: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He acknowledge his ideas by citing contemporary communities characteristics of each stage except, lower savagery, of which there were no surviving examples.

Morgan’s work was very largely read and became the basis for further changes in anthropology, maybe most notably in focus on cross-cultural comparison and its obsession with the systems of development. His work handles arguments on issues, such as the relative importance of technological innovations that were of major concern for the rest of the 19th century and continued well in the 20th century. Though it is treated as important in the history of anthropology, Morgan’s work and truly unilinear cultural evolution altogether no more hold certainly in the