Starting from the paradigm of adaptation as one of the driving forces of evolutionarily explicable change, this article traces the methodological developments of recent decades against the backdrop of various efforts to explain human behavior using empirical data from historical periods, thereby attempting to contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities for an evolutionarily informed social and cultural history within the dynamic interplay of the dual heritage of natural and cultural adaptation. The starting point is the concept of adaptation in synthetic evolutionary theory and the so-called Darwinian History, which developed in the USA in the late 1970s. Subsequently, using the controversy over the historical development of human mating systems as an example, the discussion is developed with a focus on the adaptationist paradigm and its criticism, and the different explanatory approaches are compared. Although there are still major reservations within the social and historical sciences regarding ultimate explanations based on Darwinian evolutionary theory, new interdisciplinary bridges have been established over the last 20 years through approaches such as Deep History and Evolutionary History from the historical sciences and Genetic History from evolutionary anthropology.