Cultural evolution refers to the development of human cultures over time.

It is a process of
change that occurs as a result of interactions between people from different cultures. Cultural
evolution is an ongoing process that has been occurring since the earliest days of human
civilization.

The study of the evolution of cultural systems has undergone a series of permutations in the
course of the past century. Studies of cultural evolution began in earnest with the work of two of
the most important anthopological figures in the nineteenth century: Lewis Henry Morgan (1877)
and Edward B. Tylor (1871, 1881). Both Morgan and Tylor recognized that there were broad
patterns of similarity that could be recognized in many different cultures around the world, and
developed parallel typologies for categorizing these cross-cultural patterns. The typological
system used by Morgan and Tylor broke cultures down into three basic evolutionary stages:
savagery, barbarism and civilization. Both believed that all societies at the "civilization" stage
had gone through the other two stages and those at the "savagery" or "barbarian" stages were,
presumably, on their way to "civilization." These three stages were characterized by specific
supposedly shared attributes and was called the unilinear evolutionary theory

There are two major forms of cultural evolution theory: unilinear

evolutionism and multilinear evolutionism. The former is the original cultural evolutionism
theory that is now widely considered debunked, while the latter is the more modern view that is
still considered relevant in anthropology today.

Cultural evolutionism first developed in anthropology in the 1870s, just a few years after
Charles Darwin published his landmark text on evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of
Species (1859). In his work, Darwin laid out his theory that all life on Earth had evolved from a
common ancestor, and that changes in lifeforms took place through the mechanism of natural
selection. Darwin's work took the scientific world by storm, and anthropologists started to
suggest that if animals evolve, culture might evolve as well. They started applying evolutionary
theory to cultural anthropology as a way to explain changes in human cultures over time.