Evolutionism and diffusionism are two important theoretical approaches in social and cultural anthropology that attempted to explain the development and diversity of human cultures. Both emerged prominently during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they differed significantly in their explanations of cultural change. Evolutionism emphasized the independent and progressive development of societies, whereas diffusionism explained cultural similarities mainly through the spread of cultural traits from one society to another. Evolutionism developed during the nineteenth century under the influence of ideas of biological evolution, particularly those associated with Charles Darwin. Anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan and James George Frazer proposed that human societies passed through different stages of cultural development. Tylor suggested that societies generally moved from simpler to more complex forms. His evolutionary perspective classified cultural development into stages and attempted to identify general laws governing human cultural progress. Morgan similarly proposed a sequence of savagery, barbarism and civilization, arguing that technological and social developments accompanied movement through these stages. Evolutionists believed that different societies could represent different stages of a single universal process of development. For example, differences in marriage, religion, technology and political organization were interpreted as evidence of varying levels of social evolution. The concept of survivals, developed by Tylor, referred to cultural practices that had survived from earlier stages of development even after their original functions had disappeared. However, classical evolutionism was criticized for being ethnocentric and speculative. Anthropologists often placed