Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research

While those who study human origins now agree that the evolution of the modern human form extends back much further that the evolution of modern human behaviour, they disagree as to how to interpret the substantive data. Two fundamentally incommensurate interpretations of our origins, the "Replacement" camp and the "Continuity" camp, have now emerged out of the pre-existing models and theories that go back to the last quarter of the 19th century. This book contnds that these positions are based on radically different biases and assumptions about what the remote huiman past was like. The purpose of this volume is to examine those conceptual differences, not to arrive at a concensus, but rather to explore the reasons why a concensus might never be possible. Archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists, and molecular biologists representing various continuity and replacement positions attempt to make seinse of what is known about the human past.