# Boyden, ‘Human Biohistory’, 2013 > [!cite] Citation > Boyden, Stephen. ‘Human Biohistory’. In *Long Term Socio-Ecological Research*. Human–Environment Interactions, vol. 2. Edited by Simron Jit Singh. Springer, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1177-8_7. > [!abstract] > Human biohistory is learning about human situations against the background of the story of life on Earth. One of its key features is recognition that the evolutionary emergence of the human capacity for culture was one of the great watersheds in the history of life. Human culture has become a new kind of force in the biosphere – with profound and far reaching impacts not only on humans themselves but also on the rest of the living world. The chapter briefly discusses some important biohistorical principles, including cultural maladaptation and cultural reform, technoaddiction and the evolutionary health principle. --- ## quotes ‘The word culture has many rather different meanings. Here it is used to mean the abstract products of the capacity for culture, such as learned language itself and the accumulated knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, values and technological competence of a human population.’ [[Boyden, ‘Human Biohistory’, 2013|(Boyden 2013, 140)]] ^daa3a8 ‘Through the processes of biological evolution, the human species had acquired a distinctive and extraordinarily significant biological attribute — the capacity for culture.’ [[Boyden, ‘Human Biohistory’, 2013|(Boyden 2013, 141)]] ^dcec9a ‘The most essential aspect of this capacity \[for culture] is the human ability to invent and learn a symbolic spoken language, and to use it for communicating among ourselves. This linguistic aptitude depends on both characteristics of the human brain and on special anatomical arrangements in the region of the larynx, pharynx and tongue which permit us to utter an amazing range of different sounds.’ [[Boyden, ‘Human Biohistory’, 2013|(Boyden 2013, 141)]] ^eb48ae