The ANU School of Philosophy is proud to be hosting a three-day workshop on the evolution of kinship. The event will be run by Nick Evans, Kim Sterelny, and Stephen Levinson.

“Kinship is central to social life, connecting the biological facts of reproduction to the social facts of family relationships and social categorisation. Moreover, the expansion of recognised kin networks probably played a key role in the expanded social universe of early humans or their hominin forebears. Even humans in the simplest historically known societies live in far larger and more interconnected worlds than any of our great ape relatives. But how did we get from there to here, and what kind of social, linguistic, and cognitive resources needed to appear to support the intricate systems known from ethnography? This workshop is unusual in bringing together primatologists, linguists, philosophers and anthropologists to examine the evolution of kinship systems from the pre-human through the early human to attested human societies. “

Kim Sterelny

Philosophy Program

You can find more information on this webpage: http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/revisiting-the-evolution-of-kinship/