Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant framework for describing and interpreting European prehistory. It has gained even more salience in recent years because the new information coming from ancient DNA about the genetic ancestry of individuals in prehistory seems to show that this correlates closely with the cultural affiliation of the archaeological material with which they are found, raising concerns that old and discredited links between biological and cultural identity are being revived. This article argues that exploring the links between cultural and genetic ancestry does not need to fall into these errors if it takes its theory and methods from the discipline of cultural evolution and rejects characterization of the relationship in terms of ‘ethnic groups’. This involves describing the archaeological record in more fine‐grained, less essentialist ways and at the same time linking the archaeological and genetic patterns to histories of the rise and decline of populations and the interactions between them.

中文翻译：

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欧洲史前时期的人口、文化历史和变化动态★

尽管文化史的缺点受到许多批评，但文化史实际上仍然是描述和解释欧洲史前史的主导框架。近年来，这一问题变得更加引人注目，因为来自古代 DNA 的有关史前个体遗传祖先的新信息似乎表明，这与发现这些个体的考古材料的文化归属密切相关，这引起了人们的担忧生物身份和文化身份之间不可信的联系正在复活。本文认为，如果探索文化祖先和遗传祖先之间的联系的理论和方法来自于文化进化的学科，并且拒绝用“族群”来描述这种关系，那么就不必陷入这些错误。这涉及以更细致、更少本质主义的方式描述考古记录，同时将考古和遗传模式与人口兴衰的历史以及人口之间的相互作用联系起来。