Biocultural anthropology can be defined in many ways. it is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology in addition to culture. "Instead of looking for the underlying biological roots of human behavior, biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities as well as limitations."
Physical anthropologists throughout the first half of the 20th century viewed this relationship from a racial perspective; that is, from the given that typological human biological differences lead to cultural differences. After World War II the emphasis began to shift toward an attempt to study the role culture plays in shaping human biology. The shift towards understanding the role of culture to human biology led to the coding of Dual inheritance theory in the 1960s. In version to, and coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of. the developing of Dual-inheritance theory, biocultural evolution was provided and first used in the 1970s.