This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... A large part of the life of the earth has "remained steadfastly where it was cradled, beneath the waves. But more restless portions have left the sea and crept forth upon the land, or swarmed into the air. One migration, the most numerous, is represented by the insects. Another, the most enterprising, was the amphibian. After ages of evolution the amphibian branch divided. One branch acquired wings and sailed off into the air. The other divided and subdivided. One of these subdivisions entered the forests, climbed and clambered among the trees, acquired perpendicularity and hands, descended and walked upon the soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states, and imagined itself immortal. Human society is but the van--the hither terminus--of an evolutional process which had its beginning away back in the protoplasm of primeval waters. There is not a form that creeps beneath the sea but can claim kinship with the eagle. The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly amoeba. xi. Conclusion. The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of organic beings have come about as a result of the action and reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being--and not only every being, but every species, the whole organic world--has come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences, the same...

The Universal Kinship, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1918 Edition.

At some point in the course of evolutionâe"from a primeval social organization of early hominidsâe"all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relativesâe"chimpanzees and bonobosâe"and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think. Many books on kinship have been written by social anthropologists, but Primeval Kinship is the first book dedicated to the evolutionary origins of human kinship. And perhaps equally important, it is the first book to suggest that the study of kinship and social organization can provide a link between social and biological anthropology.