Summary

Bio-cultural dynamics of the Caribbean area essay in ecological anthropobiology. 

The Caribbean area admirably lends itself to an analysis of the biocultural dynamics of human populations : the area is characterized by the relative thinness of its past, the multiplicity of its racial groups, its socio-ethnic stratification, and the emergence of a series of insular groups which, in a highly diversified natural and human environment, have been exposed to analogous pressures at the economics and political levels. 

The various factors that affect the evolutionary dynamics of this area are examined in turn : social Organisation, family structure, demography, systems of values, and the interrelationships between ethnic groups. In each case, the influence of those factors on the genetic structure of the population is emphasized. 

The way in which those factors combine, at the level of the population unit which each island constitutes, is analysed next. In such ecosystems, the social and genetic facts associate and react upon one another in a way which determine the lines along which the gene pool will develop.