Four hundred years of niche construction in the western Solomon Islands

Abstract

In a recent issue of Current Anthropology (Fuentes and Wiessner 2016), dedicated to how anthropology might bridge or reintegrate across the evolutionary/scientific and constructivist or humanistic approaches which seem to divide us, the editors offer the extended evolution synthesis (EES) and niche construction theory (NCT; Laland et al. 2014) as a way forward. Fuentes states that ‘humans construct ecological, technical and cultural niches that influence the structure of evolutionary landscapes’ and argues: