By the 1860s the stage was set for evolutionist anthropology to come into its own within what was then, in Britain as on the Continent, usually called ethnology. It had already done so in archaeology, especially in Denmark. There the three-age theory (Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age) had been systematically propagated from around 1836 by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, Sven Nilsson, and others (see, e.g., Trigger 1989: 73–86). Yet what became British anthropology grew not so much from this source, nor from evolutionary ideas in biology, but from questions of the relation between contemporary ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ societies and Victorian England.

This chapter examines some parallels and disjunctions between the biological and anthropological traditions. It chronicles the rise of evolutionist anthropology, mainly in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its rapid development as the major paradigm for understanding human society prior to functionalism and relativism. It also covers the return to evolutionist thought in the middle of the twentieth century, mainly in America, and the growth of evolutionist ideas towards the end of the twentieth century.

Essentially, there are just four broad strands of evolutionist thinking in anthropology: unilinear, universal, and multilinear evolutionism, plus neo-Darwinism. The first three have been gradualist approaches, and their labels come from Julian Steward (1955 [1953]: 11–29), a practitioner of multilinear evolutionism. Neo-Darwinism comes in different guises, from 1970s sociobiology and its aftermath to more recent approaches to the origin of symbolic culture.