Introduction: Human Origins.pdf

2009

List of figures page viii List of tables ix Preface xi 1 Introduction 1 2 If chimps could talk 18 3 Fossils and what they tell us 33 4 Group size and settlement 53 5 Teaching, sharing and exchange 70 6 Origins of language and symbolism 90 7 Elementary structures of kinship 8 A new synthesis 9 Conclusions Glossary References Index viii 1 Social anthropology is a discipline largely missing from the study of human origins. Until now, the discipline has sidelined itself. Yet its central concerns with notions like society, culture and cross-cultural comparison make it of the utmost relevance for understanding the origins of human social life, and relevant too as an aid for speculation on the kinds of society our ancestors inhabited. Like archaeologists, social anthropologists can dig backwards through layers of time, into the origins of language, symbolism, ritual, kinship and the ethics and politics of reciprocity. When did human origins begin? That is a trick question. Of course, human origins began when humanity began, but in another sense human origins began when origins became an intellectual issue. There is no real history of engagement between social anthropology and early humanity, so one must be created here. Social anthropology's ancestral disciplines, like moral philosophy and jurisprudence, natural history and antiquarianism, travelogue and philology, all fed into post-medieval developments in building a picture of 'early man'. Yet, as I have implied, social anthropology proper has been absent. Since the days of Franz Boas at the dawn of the twentieth century, the study of human origins has been seen instead as the preserve of biological or physical anthropology. While not wishing to encroach too deeply into biological territory, in this book I want to carve out within social anthropology a new subdiscipline. I see this as a subdiscipline that touches on the biological and makes full use too of a century and a half of social anthropology-its accumulated experience and especially some of its more recent, and relevant, developments. Scientific interest in human origins in fact has quite a long history. Seventeenth-century European thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke speculated on the 'natural' condition of 'man', and its relation to the earliest forms of human society. Eighteenth-century thinkers continued this tradition, and archaeological and linguistic concerns were added at that time. In the nineteenth century, the theory or theories of evolution, as well as important fossil finds like the first Neanderthal in 1857 and Pithecanthropus in 1891, provided much added impetus. Indeed, the later A short history of human origins The seventeenth century Archaeology, or more accurately its predecessor, antiquarian studies, emerged as an amateur pursuit in the seventeenth century. Even before that, in the early sixteenth century, Italian geologists had speculated on the idea of stone tools as antecedents of iron ones (Trigger 1989: 53). However, the great social thinkers like Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and even Locke were not among those who had such notions. Social theory in the seventeenth century seemed almost completely oblivious to such insights and to the growing interest, throughout much of Europe, in early technology and in comparisons between Europeans of the past and the inhabitants of Africa or the Americas at the time. In retrospect, Darwinian theory, though, might as easily be contrasted to Monboddo's. Far from being a 'forerunner of Darwin', as is often said, Monboddo embodies an otherwise never-fully realized eighteenth-century vision which is the antithesis of Darwin. If in probing the boundaries of 'man' Monboddo defined the 'Orang Outang' as part of the category, Darwin did the opposite: he defined 'man' as an 'ape' (figure 1.1). Linnaeus came close to seeing both sides of the problem that would haunt Darwin when (later Lord Avebury), were also prominent in archaeology. Among other twists of fate, the foremost ethnologist of the late nineteenth century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, met Henry Christie while travelling in Cuba in 1856, and Christie persuaded him to accompany him to Mexico. Christie, like Lubbock a banker, ethnologist and archaeologist, was

American Anthropologist, 2003

We present a review of the history of scientific inquiry into modern human origins, focusing on the role of the American Anthropologist. We begin during the mid-20th century, at the time when the problem of modern human origins was first presented in the American Anthropologist and could first be distinguished from more general questions about human and hominid origins. Next, we discuss the effects of the modern evolutionary synthesis on biological anthropology and paleoanthropology in particular, and its role in the origin of anthropological genetics. The rise of human genetics is discussed along two tracks, which have taken starkly different approaches to the historical interpretation of recent human diversity. We cover varying paleoanthropological interpretations, including paleoanthropologists' reactions to genetic interpretations. We hope to identify some of the crucial inflection points in which the debate went astray, to rectify some of the points of misunderstanding among current scientists, and to clarify the likely path ahead.

Human Evolution

Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered, 2013

In the late 1980s, I went off to college interested in a handful of possible futures but certain of none. A moment of clarity came in a "theory and method in physical anthropology" class when the topic of the week, and of one of my papers, turned toward modern human origins. This had become the hot topic of paleoanthropology by the late 1980s and had largely eclipsed the field's obsession with hominin origins. As I delved into its literature for the first time, I encountered a single book that not only was a wealth of information for the paper that I needed to write but also the work that had been instrumental in changing the focus of paleoanthropology. This book, Smith and Spencer's The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence (1984), was a weighty tome that I felt as I carried it around with me for the rest of the semester and well after I had turned in my first paper on modern human origins. Other books on modern human origins had come out by the late 1980s and all had their own strengths. However, what set Origins apart, aside from being the first, was its detailed fossil descriptions and decidedly new theoretical explanations combined with comprehensive geographical coverage. Many of the book's chapters went on to become core readings for any student of physical anthropology, and the book as a whole became essential for all paleoanthropologists. Origins transformed me and many others from undeclared college students into anthropology majors determined to become paleoanthropologists.

2013

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and …, 1992

Two competing hypotheses have long dominated specialist thinking on modern human origins. The first posits that modern people emerged in a limited area and spread from there to replace archaic people elsewhere. Proponents of this view currently favor Africa as the modern human

2017

What are the principles of current evolutionism? Starting from the very important evolutionary science base since Darwin, this book tries to tell the history of the human being as a species, from its earliest origins, to the closest irony of its biological condition with respect to the environmental environment, passing through anchored explanations In Archeology and Anthropology, as well as by the more materialistic explanations of human beings, Marxism and other social schools. It is true that, although it is true that many of the evolutionary determinants of the human being are only scientifically explicable through evolutionism, the different interpretations of the same, as well as the different theoretical applications to the human being and its nature remain, even today in Day, a reason for discussion (a discussion that, from the point of view of the vast majority of the specialized scientific community, is not useful today). Prologue by José Julio Martínez Valero.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B, 2001

The question of the mode of origin of modern humans (Homo sapiens) has dominated palaeoanthropological debate over the last decade. This review discusses the main models proposed to explain modern human origins, and examines relevant fossil evidence from Eurasia, Africa and Australasia. Archaeological and genetic data are also discussed, as well as problems with the concept of 'modernity' itself. It is concluded that a recent African origin can be supported for H. sapiens, morphologically, behaviourally and genetically, but that more evidence will be needed, both from Africa and elsewhere, before an absolute African origin for our species and its behavioural characteristics can be established and explained.

American Anthropologist, 1994

Questions of origins have long had a prominent place in archaeology, and none more so than the question concerning the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens. The issue is partly anatomical, and through the skeletal record physical anthropologists can chart some of the key changes which took place in human bodily morphology. For archaeology, however, the crucial issue is cultural, rather than biological. At what stage, or by what stages, did human behaviour and consciousness reach the form we associate with modern humans today? This is the key issue addressed by Stringer and Gamble in their recent book In Search of the Neanderthals. It is far from being theonly recent book on thesubject; but it is perhaps unique in combining the skills of a palaeoanthropologist and an archaeologist as joint authors. The result is a wide-ranging discussion of the case for and against an African origin for modern humans. Much of their attention is focused on the status of the famous Neanderthals, who immediately precede the appearance of modern humans in Europe. Were the Neanderthals simply absorbed into the modern human populations, or did they die out, unable to compete with the new arrivals? This has become the subject of a well-known and often heated debate in recent years, stimulated in part by the controversial study of mitochondrial DNA. But human genetics are only a part of the question. What about language, symbolism and technology? Did the Neanderthals speak to each other? How did they interact, if at all, with modern humans? Were modern humans the first to develop artistic expression? Did the Neanderthals organize their lives, their living sites and their hunting strategies differently? It is on issues such as these that archaeology comes into its own, shedding light on patterns of behaviour through the meticulous study of settlement remains and cultural traces. Were the Neanderthals our close relatives, or if not near-related, were they at least very like ourselves? This is a debate destined to run and run, as perhaps is only natural for an issue so primordial as the origins and individuality of our own species. In the pages which follow we have invited a number of reactions to In Search of the Neanderthals, spanning a range of different viewpoints. First of all, however, we have asked the authors themselves to summarize their approach.