CULTURAL EVOLUTION

the development of a culture from simpler to more complex forms, by a continuous process. The subject may be viewed unilinearly, tracing the evolution of humankind as a whole; or it may be viewed multilinearly, treating the evolution of each culture or society (or of given parts of a culture or society) individually. Cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of cultural anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Age of Discovery following the voyages of Columbus, an age that introduced Europeans to primitive (i.e., traditional) cultures around the world, witnessed the beginnings of modern anthropology, as intellectuals sought to explain the existence of these cultures and to theorize about the evolution of European society from people assumed to be very much like them. When the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described primeval man as living in conditions in which there are no arts, no letters, no society and his life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, he was very much proclaiming a popular conception of the savage. Everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development out of this lowly state. Even rationalistic philosophes like Voltaire implicitly assumed that enlightenment gradually resulted in the upward progress of humankind. Together with the idea of progress there grew the notion of fixed stages through which human societies progress, usually numbering threesavagery, barbarism, and civilizationbut sometimes many more. The Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or epochs, the final one having started with the French Revolution, which was destined, in his eyes, to usher in the rights of man and the perfection of the human race.