Investigating Cultural Macroevolution through Biological Phylogenetic Analyses of Chinese Dai People Costumes Pattern

摘要

What are the driving forces for cultural macroevolution has engaged anthropologists for more than a century. Recently, the debate on the evolution of culture has focused on two processes in particular, phylogenesis and ethnogenesis, and has been suggested that the latter has probably always been more significant than the former. Cladistic methods of phylogenetic reconstruction was used to assess a data set consist of 119 costume motifs derived from costumes pattern and decorative characters from some groups of Dai people and its accompanying group of Yi and Hani people in Yunnan, China. The results indicate that phylogenesis was the dominant process in the culture evolution of costumes pattern and decorative characteristics of Dai people, accounting for about 60% of the resemblances among the Dai people costumes pattern. These results do not support the proposition that ethnogenesis has always been a more significant process in cultural evolution than phylogenesis.