Neo-Evolutionism: Multilinear Evolution and Cultural Ecology

By the early 1900s, most anthropologists had stopped talking about cultural evolution altogether. The classical evolutionary school of the 19th century, associated with thinkers like Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor, had collapsed under the weight of its own biases. It ranked societies on a single ladder from savagery to civilization, and unsurprisingly, European and American societies always sat at the top. By the 1950s, though, a new generation of American anthropologists decided the idea of cultural evolution was worth saving, just not in its old form. This revival, known as neo-evolutionism, tried to keep what was useful about evolutionary thinking while fixing what had gone wrong with it the first time around.

Why evolutionary theory made a comeback 🔗

Classical evolutionism had two big problems. First, it was Eurocentric, treating Western industrial society as the natural endpoint of human development. Second, its methods were weak. Evolutionists built grand theories from armchair speculation rather than fieldwork, and they often picked evidence that fit their conclusions instead of testing their conclusions against evidence.

After the World Wars, a group of scholars including Julian Steward, Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service tried to bring evolutionary thinking back on firmer ground. They wanted to explain both the particular histories of individual cultures and the broader patterns that show up again and again across unrelated societies. Crucially, they insisted on empirical verification rather than speculation, which is exactly what critics said classical evolutionism lacked. Julian Steward became one of the central figures in this revival, and his push for scientific rigor helped anthropology recover the idea of cultural evolution without repeating the mistakes of the earlier school, an approach he developed through decades of ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork rather than theorizing from a desk, as described in his Britannica biography.

Marshall Sahlins: general evolution and specific evolution 🔗

Marshall Sahlins, working with Elman Service, split evolutionary change into two distinct processes. General evolution refers to the overall trend toward greater complexity across human history as a whole, similar to the trunk of a tree that keeps growing taller and thicker over time. Specific evolution refers to how individual cultures adapt to their particular environments, producing enormous variation, much like branches spreading out in different directions from that same trunk.

Sahlins was careful to separate complexity from superiority. When a culture becomes more organizationally complex over time, that only tells you something about its internal structure, not about whether it is somehow better than a simpler society. This distinction mattered a great deal in a discipline trying to shed its Eurocentric past.

Adaptability, adaptation, and adaptive radiation 🔗

Sahlins also drew a line between adaptability and adaptation. Adaptation describes how a culture adjusts to a specific environment, becoming very efficient within that narrow context. Adaptability describes something broader: the capacity to handle a wider range of situations, even unfamiliar ones.

This distinction explains what Sahlins called adaptive radiation. Some cultures develop technologies or organizational tools that let them dominate and spread across many different environments, sometimes at the expense of others. European colonial expansion, powered by gunpowder and advanced navigation, is a commonly cited example of this kind of radiation. It is worth noting that adaptive radiation frequently involves conquest and war, and its spread does not necessarily translate into a net benefit for humanity as a whole. Meanwhile, cultures that are very finely adapted to a specific environment can be highly effective within that niche, but they remain vulnerable. When a more adaptable culture arrives, the narrowly adapted one often gets displaced or destroyed, precisely because its strength was tied to one particular setting rather than to flexibility.

Leslie White and the energy theory of culture 🔗

Leslie White took a different route back to evolutionary thinking, one closer in spirit to Tylor’s original unilinear model. White accepted the cultural relativist idea, popular in American anthropology at the time, that no single culture is inherently superior to another. At the same time, he argued that a society’s technological sophistication and its ability to harness energy indicated a genuine evolutionary advance. According to White’s biographical entry from Britannica, cultural evolution was driven by technological change, especially by increases in the amount of energy a society could capture and use per person.

White proposed that the amount of energy a society controls is closely tied to its standard of living, and he assumed that all human groups are, in some sense, driving toward higher standards of living. He formalized this in his Energy and Evolution of Culture theory, which included a mathematical formula meant to measure cultural development through energy output. The idea that culture evolves as the energy harnessed per person increases, or as the efficiency of the technology used to capture that energy improves, was central to what later became known as White’s law, as summarized by the New World Encyclopedia’s entry on White. In practice, applying this formula to real societies turned out to be extremely difficult, since cultural complexity resists being reduced to a single energy calculation. Still, White made an important conceptual contribution by separating history, the specific sequence of events in a particular society, from evolution, the broader process of structural change. Classical evolutionists had often blurred these two ideas together, and White’s distinction helped later anthropologists think more clearly about both.

Julian Steward’s cultural ecology 🔗

Of the neo-evolutionists, Julian Steward’s framework is generally considered the most methodologically successful. He developed what he called Cultural Ecology, which rejected the older idea that a culture is a single, uniform whole. Instead, Steward proposed a layered model made up of a core and a periphery.

The core and the periphery 🔗

The core consists of the techno-economic elements of a culture, meaning the tools, technologies, and subsistence strategies that a group uses to interact with its habitat. These core elements have a direct, functional relationship with the surrounding environment. Because there are only a limited number of viable ways to adapt to any given type of environment, cultures with similar cores can be grouped into typologies, even if they are geographically and historically unconnected.

The periphery, by contrast, covers everything that makes a culture historically and locally distinctive, such as its kinship system, religious beliefs, or artistic traditions. These elements are not directly determined by the environment, which is why two societies can share a very similar economic core while looking completely different in their social and symbolic life. Steward described a dialectical relationship between the core and the environment: technology acts on the environment and produces change, that change then demands further techno-economic adjustments, and those adjustments go on to reshape the habitat again. This ongoing feedback loop is at the heart of his approach, as Steward’s own body of work developed a scientific, empirical, and ecological method for explaining cultural diversity over the course of decades, according to an overview of his career published by iResearchNet.

Multilinear evolution as a research method 🔗

Steward’s related concept, Multilinear Evolution, was as much a research method as it was a theory. He argued that anthropologists should empirically establish the exact sequence of cultural evolution within a specific region, verifying each stage using historical and contemporary evidence rather than assuming it. This combined a functional model of how cultures work in the present with a historical model of how they changed over time.

Steward insisted that every claimed relationship between environment, technology, and social organization needed to be demonstrated with evidence, not assumed from theory. Since the exigencies of different physical and historical settings produce different outcomes in each case, Steward argued that cultures follow multiple, divergent lines of change rather than a single universal sequence, a concept he termed multilinear evolution, as noted in Britannica’s account of his work. This inductive approach produced lasting classifications of subsistence modes, such as hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture, that anthropologists still use today. It allowed researchers to classify societies based on their culture core alone, without needing to account for every peripheral detail that makes each society unique.

What neo-evolutionism left behind: foragers across continents 🔗

One of the clearest demonstrations of cultural ecology at work comes from comparing hunter-gatherer societies on different continents. The Paliyans of South India and the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert have no historical connection, yet both groups share core features tied to their shared subsistence strategy: similar toolkits, mobility patterns, and basic forms of social organization built around foraging. The Paliyan community, living in the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, has traditionally relied on foraging for yams, honey hunting, and small game, practices that closely parallel the subsistence strategies of San groups thousands of kilometers away. At the same time, the two groups remain culturally distinct in the areas that fall outside their economic core, such as language, kinship structure, and belief systems.

This pattern is exactly what Steward’s model predicts. Similar environmental pressures on similar subsistence strategies tend to produce similar core adaptations, even when the cultures involved have no contact with one another and diverge sharply everywhere else.

The legacy of neo-evolutionism 🔗

The lasting contribution of neo-evolutionism was not any single theory but a shift in method. Sahlins, White, and Steward disagreed on plenty of specifics, but together they replaced the speculative, biased reasoning of classical evolutionism with an insistence on empirical, verifiable claims. Steward’s cultural ecology in particular gave anthropologists a workable framework for explaining why unrelated societies facing similar environmental constraints often converge on similar economic and organizational solutions, while still remaining historically and culturally unique in everything else. That balance between pattern and particularity is what makes neo-evolutionism still relevant to how anthropologists study cultural change today.

What do you think? Do you think Sahlins’ distinction between adaptability and adaptation still helps explain why some societies today expand their influence globally while others stay rooted in a single way of life? And looking at Steward’s core-periphery model, which parts of your own community’s daily life would you place in the economic core, and which would you place in the periphery?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Steward
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-A-White
3. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Leslie_White
4. https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/julian-h-steward/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paliyan