The former assumes that cultural change observed in the archaeological record can be best explained by the direct action of natural selection and other Darwinian processes on heritable variation in artifacts and behavior.
The former draws on analogies with genetic and biological evolution in that it focuses on variation in cultural traits and attempts to reconstruct their phylogenetic histories.
[11] Richerson and Boyd[8] (2005), define culture as "information capable of affecting individual’s behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission".
[12] These traits can go extinct as a result of competition, change in function or become vestigial, and adapt to their environment, as demonstrated by the work of human behavioral ecologists (Smith & Winterhalder 1992).
[2] EA emphasizes the role of natural selection in affecting human behavior and do not consider the need to understand changing cultural traditions as part of their framework[3] (Shennan 2008).
By using this analogy, it allows anthropologists and archaeologists, to apply strict phylogenetic methods to cultural data, no differently than evolutionary biologists (Mesoudi, 2006).
For example, O’Brien & Lyman (2000) uses the evolutionary “population thinking” explanatory frameworks,[15] while Mace & Holden (2005) use cladistics[16] and Neiman (1995) and uses models of selection or drift.
[17] Mesoudi (2006) positions, that only in recent development have archaeologist started utilizing these phylogenetic approached in analyzing material remains and human history.
This is that similar traits that vary through time are “causally connected by inheritance” which O’Brien & Lyman (2000) term the assumption of “heritable continuity”.
[23] O’Brien and Lyman (2000) are some of the first archaeologist to systematically employ this phylogenetic approach to material remains, specifically, have expanded the theory to explain prehistoric artifacts.
This is accomplished by collecting an assemblage of material remains of a specific cultural trait, such a projectile point, and then artifacts are ordered by similarity.
By employing these phylogenic and specifically seriation methods they “show continuous, and gradually changing variation rather than a small number of distinct types” [11](Mesoudi, 2006).
They are practitioners of this approach because they argue that this method does not “force artifacts into distinct categories and distorts their true phylogenetic relationships”[15] (O’Brien and Lyman 2000).
[24] They have conducted successful research “using a phylogenetic analysis of 621 Paleo-Indian projectile points from the Southeastern United States[25] and Tehrani and Collard (2002) used similar methods to reconstruct the history of Turkmen textile pattern[4]”.
However, they acknowledge the application of phylogenetics in archaeology is no different than in paleobiology therefore one can expect similar problems to arise, such as distinguishing between homologies and analogies.
Neiman (1995), used a model that incorporated the selectively neutral but opposing forces of drift and innovation to show changes in ornamental styles of Illinois Woodland ceramic,[17] while Bentley and Shennan (2003) “found that the frequencies of West German pottery decorations over the course of 400 years can be predicted by a similar model of unbiased cultural transmission, with some anti-conformist bias in later period”.
[30] Evolutionary ecology also employs Darwinian properties; however natural selection is involved in the development of the cognitive process that led humans to be able to make fitness enhancing decisions.
Archaeologist who utilized EE, use adaptive design as a starting point to create and test models by incorporating optimization goals, currencies and constraints (Boone & Smith 1998).
[2] Therefore, they claim that the only role natural selection plays in and EE framework is in the development of the cognitive process that allow humans to make adaptive decisions, and respond to variable environments.
What is important to gather is that by applying an EE analysis to anthropological and archaeological phenomena, it allows researchers to employ phenotypic plasticity to the explanations of human behavior.
By doing so, this explanatory framework gives humans the cognitive abilities to “adapt to change quicker that they could through natural selection acting on genetic variation” (Boone and Smith, 1998).