Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews

About Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews

About Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews is a review journal of biological and evolutionary anthropology published by Wiley. It carries print ISSN 1060-1538 and electronic ISSN 1520-6505, has been published since 1992, and is known shortly as Evolutionary Anthropology. Unlike a primary-research journal, its mission is synthesis: it commissions and publishes review articles, issues and debates, news and commentary that take stock of where the study of human evolution stands. Its subject is the evolution of humans and other primates — fossil evidence and palaeoanthropology, primatology, human evolutionary genetics, archaeology of early humans, evolutionary approaches to human behaviour and health, and the methods, from ancient DNA to field primatology, that are changing what can be known. Secondary sources summarising Scopus data place the journal in the top tier of anthropology — reported as Q1 in Anthropology, ranked around 10 of 502 in that Scopus category in recent summaries — and its articles are assigned DOIs under Wiley's 10.1002/evan prefix, as in 10.1002/evan.21432 for a widely read 2015 review on applying evolutionary anthropology.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
• Short title: Evolutionary Anthropology
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 1060-1538 (print); 1520-6505 (electronic)
• DOI pattern: 10.1002/evan.*
• Publishing since: 1992
• Type: Review journal — reviews, issues articles, book reviews, letters and news, rather than primary data papers
• Field: Biological anthropology, palaeoanthropology, primatology, archaeology, human evolutionary genetics and behaviour

A Review Journal — and Why That Matters

Most journals in anthropology publish new data: a fossil description, a field study, a genetic analysis. Evolutionary Anthropology exists one level up. Its articles ask what the accumulated evidence means — whether a theory still holds, how two lines of evidence fit together, what a new method does to old conclusions. The subtitle is a literal table of contents: Issues — substantial review and debate articles on live questions; News — reports and commentary on developments in the field; and Reviews — critical reviews of important new books. The journal also carries letters responding to published pieces, so arguments continue across issues rather than ending at publication.

This format gives the journal an influence out of proportion to the number of articles it publishes. A well-judged review in Evolutionary Anthropology becomes the entry point through which students, teachers and researchers from neighbouring fields — psychology, biology, medicine, archaeology — first understand a topic, and it is cited accordingly. The review on applying evolutionary anthropology, published in volume 24 (2015), illustrates the genre at its best: written by anthropologists working on population change, fertility, development intervention and child health, it set out what an evolutionary framework offers policy and practice, tabulated common misunderstandings about evolutionary behavioural anthropology — clarifying, for instance, that evolutionary explanations do not commit the naturalistic fallacy and are not Social Darwinism — and worked through evidence such as the effect of piped water, reducing women's water-carrying loads, on birth rates in Ethiopian villages. A primary journal could not have published that synthesis; a review journal exists precisely for it.

Scope in Detail

Palaeoanthropology and the fossil record

Reviews assess what fossil discoveries mean for human origins: new hominin finds, dating revisions, comparative anatomy, and long-running arguments about pattern and process in evolution. Discussions reprinted and debated in the journal have treated topics such as punctuated equilibrium, developmental constraints and allometry, species selection, and the interpretation of geographic variation and clines — the classic theoretical questions of palaeontology applied to the human record. Articles in this strand typically survey a contested area even-handedly, separate what the specimens show from what has been inferred, and identify what evidence would settle the argument.

Primatology

Understanding living primates is essential to reconstructing extinct ones, and the journal reviews primate behaviour, ecology, cognition and conservation-relevant science as part of its core remit. Work on apes and monkeys — their social organisation, communication, tool use and variation — is treated both in its own right and for the comparative light it sheds on human evolution.

Human evolutionary genetics and ancient DNA

Few areas have moved faster than genetics. Reviews in the journal cover population genetics, admixture, selection on the human genome, and the ancient DNA revolution that has rewritten parts of the human story — including the relationships among modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Synthesis here is especially valuable because methodological change is rapid and claims are frequently revised; a dated review should be read alongside the primary literature that followed it.

Archaeology and human behaviour

The archaeological record of technology, subsistence and dispersal, and evolutionary approaches to behaviour — human behavioural ecology, life-history theory, parental investment, cooperation and cultural transmission — form another major strand. The applying-evolutionary-anthropology review described above belongs here: it presents evolutionary anthropology as a framework generating hypotheses from principles of selection, drift and mutation, weighing ultimate against proximate causation, and applies that framework to fertility, health, education, resource use and development policy, with Ethiopian and Tanzanian field evidence. Book reviews and debates in this area connect anthropology to evolutionary psychology, economics and public policy, sometimes contentiously — which the letters format is designed to accommodate.

Evolution, health and medicine

The journal's categorisation spans anthropology and medical subjects, reflecting real content: evolutionary perspectives on health, disease, reproduction, growth and ageing. Reviews applying life-history and adaptationist reasoning to contemporary health questions — including in vulnerable pastoralist and farming communities — show how the field speaks to global health without leaving its evolutionary foundations.

Who Writes It, Who Reads It

Review journals of this kind publish largely by invitation and proposal: editors identify topics that need synthesis and scholars positioned to write them, while also considering proposed reviews from specialists. The practical consequence for authors is that an unsolicited full manuscript is rarely the right first step; a proposal or enquiry to the editors, setting out the topic, why a synthesis is timely, and the author's standing in the area, fits the journal's working method. Intending authors should confirm the current editors, article categories and proposal route on the journal's Wiley Online Library pages, since editorial arrangements change over a journal's long life and this profile deliberately does not name individual editors.

The readership is correspondingly broad: biological anthropologists keeping up outside their specialty, archaeologists and geneticists tracking the human-evolution conversation, evolutionary psychologists and biologists seeking the anthropological view, and — importantly — teachers and students. Review articles pitched at the informed non-specialist are a standard teaching resource, and many readers will meet a topic first, and sometimes only, through this journal's account of it. That places a particular responsibility on its reviews to be accurate, current and fair to competing positions, and it explains the journal's standing: in a fast, fragmented field, a trusted synthesis is scarce and valuable.

Publication and Access

The journal is published by Wiley and distributed through Wiley Online Library, where the current issue, back archive to the journal's early years, and author guidance are held. It is primarily a subscription journal rather than a fully open access title; individual articles may be open access where authors have taken that option, and some content is deposited in open repositories — the applying-evolutionary-anthropology review, for example, is openly readable in PubMed Central. Readers without institutional access should check a repository copy by title or DOI before concluding that an article cannot be obtained, and librarians should note the DOI stem 10.1002/evan when configuring link resolvers, since the journal is often cited by its short title alone.

Citation and Identity Notes

Cite the journal as Evolutionary Anthropology with year, volume, pages and DOI — for example Evolutionary Anthropology 24: 3–14 (2015), DOI 10.1002/evan.21432, for the review discussed above. Do not confuse the journal with the academic discipline of the same name, with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (a research institute, not this journal's publisher), or with Springer and other publishers' books and journals containing similar words in their titles. The ISSN pair 1060-1538 and 1520-6505 and the Wiley evan DOI stem identify this title unambiguously.

Standing in the Field

Published since 1992 — more than three decades — Evolutionary Anthropology is one of the established voices of biological anthropology. Summaries of Scopus data describe it as a Q1 journal in Anthropology, placed near the very top of that category (reported as 10 of 502, within the top few percent), and Q1 also in a medical miscellaneous category, reflecting its health-related content. Such rankings fluctuate by year and provider, and readers should consult the current Scopus or SCImago record for the figure of the moment; the durable point is simpler — a review journal that has held a leading position in its field for decades, published by a major scholarly publisher, and whose syntheses are assigned, cited and argued with across anthropology and beyond. Its book reviews and letters make it also a record of the field's arguments with itself, which gives back issues a historical value that pure research archives do not always have.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Evolutionary Anthropology publish original research papers?

Primarily no. It is a review journal: its content is review and issues articles, news and commentary, book reviews and letters. Authors with primary data should target a research journal in biological anthropology instead.

How can I propose a review?

Approach the editors with a proposal through the journal's pages on Wiley Online Library, where current editorial contacts and author guidance are maintained. Explain the topic, its timeliness and your expertise in it.

Is it open access?

It is primarily subscription-based, with some articles open access or deposited in repositories such as PubMed Central. Check by DOI or title for a lawful open copy.

Is it connected with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology?

No. Despite the similar name, the institute is a separate research organisation in Leipzig. This journal is published by Wiley and identified by ISSN 1060-1538 and 1520-6505.

Conclusion

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews does one job and does it distinctively: it tells a fast-moving, interdisciplinary field what its own evidence adds up to. Through commissioned syntheses on fossils, primates, genes, archaeology, behaviour and health, through critical book reviews and through letters that keep arguments alive, it has served since 1992 as biological anthropology's common room — the place where specialists and newcomers alike go to find out not just what was discovered, but what it means.

In Depth: Landmark Themes and Debates

The journal's back archive reads as a history of the field's arguments. Theory comes first in many readers' memory: discussions of punctuated equilibrium and of Stephen Jay Gould's associated ideas — developmental constraint, exaptation, hierarchical and species selection — were aired and answered in its pages, alongside Levinton's and others' treatments of allometry and genetic correlation, and careful analyses of how clines, gene flow, drift and population structure can maintain geographic variation without selection explaining everything. These are not antiquarian topics: the same questions reappear whenever a new fossil or genome forces the field to ask whether pattern implies process. Methodological stock-taking is another recurring genre — for example, assessments of what molecular data changed in evolutionary thinking once genetic information could be obtained, clarified and verified directly, and of how sign systems, isolation and geography interact in speciation. A review journal earns its keep in such moments, because the primary papers arrive faster than any individual can read them, and someone trusted must say which claims survive contact with the whole evidence.

The Applied Turn: Evolutionary Anthropology in the World

The 2015 applying-evolutionary-anthropology review deserves a fuller account, because it shows the journal's range at its widest. Its authors — field researchers with long-term work in rural Ethiopia and northern Tanzania, studying fertility, migration, education, child health, land tenure and development intervention — argued that evolutionary anthropology offers policymakers something distinctive: a framework that explains behaviour in terms of evolved responses to past and present environments, resources and social structures. They showed how taps and water infrastructure, by cutting women's carrying loads, changed birth rates in Arsi Oromo villages; how human capital can be embodied, material or relational, and why that matters for how resources are distributed; how people predictably over-use common-pool resources, and why pay-offs differ by age, sex, wealth and status, so that no single conservation solution fits every conflict; and why family planning works best combined with, not substituted for, other development interventions designed with local context in mind. They were equally careful about misuse, tabulating misunderstandings: evolutionary and other social-science explanations operate at different levels and are not alternatives; evolutionary explanation describes, it does not prescribe what is good — the naturalistic fallacy; and the approach is not Social Darwinism. That a single journal article can carry theory, field evidence, policy and public misunderstanding in one argument is the strongest possible demonstration of why the review format, in expert hands, matters.

How the Journal Serves Different Readers

For the specialist, the journal is a filter and a forum: the place to learn, in one article, the state of a neighbouring subfield, and the place where disagreements are conducted in print, through articles, responses and letters, at a level a primary journal's comment sections rarely sustain. For the student, it is often the assigned doorway into a topic — a tutor can set one review where fifty primary papers would overwhelm — and its book reviews guide the next stage of reading. For the neighbouring scientist — the psychologist, biologist, medical researcher or archaeologist — it is the anthropological position stated accessibly, with evidence and caveats intact, which is precisely what interdisciplinary work requires and what abstracts alone cannot supply. For the interested public reader, its news and book coverage translates a field that constantly generates headlines — a new fossil, a new genome, a new date — into proportioned accounts. Each of those services depends on editorial judgement about what needs synthesising now, which is why the journal's commissioning role, described earlier, is structural rather than incidental.

Evaluating a Review You Are Reading

Because review articles carry authority, they deserve a reader's active checks. Note the date: in genetics especially, a review more than a few years old may predate decisive evidence, and its conclusions should be updated against the recent primary literature. Note the author's own position: many reviews are written by protagonists in the debate they survey — legitimate and often desirable, since they know the evidence intimately, but the reader should look for how fairly opposing work is represented and whether letters or responses in later issues qualify the account. Note the coverage claim: whether the article presents itself as comprehensive or as a perspective on selected issues — the journal's own subtitle, Issues, signals the latter genre honestly. And use the book reviews as the field's quality signal: which monographs the journal chose to review, and how critically, indicates where its editors judge the important work to be. Read that way, the journal teaches not only conclusions but the state of argument itself.

A Note on Bibliographic Verification

Every article in this journal can be verified independently through its DOI under the 10.1002/evan stem, its volume and page numbers, and the journal's ISSN pair. A librarian recording the title should enter the full title, Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, with the short title Evolutionary Anthropology, the publisher Wiley, the start year 1992, print ISSN 1060-1538 and electronic ISSN 1520-6505. Those details separate the journal from the similarly named institute in Leipzig, from textbooks and handbooks with overlapping titles, and from the discipline itself when it is mentioned in general text. Authors citing the journal should give the DOI wherever one exists, because short-title citations to a journal whose name is also a field of study are unusually easy to misread; the DOI removes all doubt. Readers searching for an article mentioned in a syllabus or a news story will find it fastest by that identifier, and repository copies, where they lawfully exist, are indexed by it as well.