Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture. Translated by Mary Turton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (original) (raw)
The Achievements and the Days. Book I. From the Origin to the Hominids.
Darwin had an idea that unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of meaningless matter in Brownian motion on the one side and the world of meaning, purpose and design on the other. This idea of evolution excluded human history. A chronological record of historical events shows that there is progress in history but the sense of the evolution is not evident. Is it possible to draw up a coherent, if schematic, view of evolution, encompassing the whole phenomenon? Man's intellectual activity usually functions within a frame of accepted concepts. He is the prisoner of paradigms that are only reluctantly questioned or abandoned. Centuries may elapse before the accumulation of paradigmatic abnormalities forces an overhaul of the accepted theories. This adjustment and adaptation of our current Weltanschauung to a better interpretation of true facts is usually violently contested and met with hostility. A disquietingly large number of scholars in all fields recurrently, systematically and easily follow pundits without exercising their own capacity of analysis. The constantly repeated erroneous initial interpretation, volunteered by a pundit who may be greedy and corrupt, backed by a subsequent blind and respectful consensus resting on a stubborn refusal of individual expenditure of mental energy, may persist during centuries without correction (one well known example is “ the sun revolves around the earth”). We can be blind to the obvious and we are also blind to our blindness. My attempt is not to produce a textbook but to present the reader with information that may be useful in establishing the different successive steps performed by evolution, leading from the origin of the Universe to contemporary Man. From the wealth of information available, the choice of the material selected and incorporated in this endeavor to present an over-all view of the entire phenomenon of evolution entailed a subjective approach. Subjectivity does not equate with partiality or intellectual dishonesty. The sequence of events that lead from the origin of the universe to contemporary man appears to me most coherently explained by the information selected. Ginsburg and Colyvan developed in 2004 a theory of population dynamics that rests on the observation that the chance of an individual to reproduce or die depends on its ability to acquire its share of the energy available to a population. This elementary observation leads them to treat organisms as real physical non-equilibrium systems of which they make the core of a theory of population dynamics. According to them, organisms continue in motion unless acted upon by a force. They conclude that the dynamics of populations depend not only on the amount of food available to a generation but also on the conditions under which the parental generation lived. They thus stress that historical knowledge is the mother of scientific knowledge. This observation comforts my endeavor to present to the reader this overview of the history of the world. Time has become a rarity. It has become impossible to know all, listen to all, visit all, learn all while the amount of available knowledge doubles every 7 years and will double less than every 3 months in 2030. I do hope that this resume of the knowledge of our time, made available to you with all its shortcomings, will interest you.
Sixty Years of Modern Human Origins in the American Anthropological Association
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.
1993 Harrison - Human Origins in Perspective
At social gatherings, when I tell people that I study human evolution, they are often surprised that the subject could possibly occupy the attention of a dedicated scientist for very long, or even, for that matter, that it could constitute the basis for a full-time professional career at all. These people are usually under the misguided belief, which is still surprisingly prevalent today, that physical anthropologists have succeeded in uncovering only the most meager of evidence to actually document the evolutionary history of humans. With apparently so little to do, paleoanthropologists are usually perceived as falling in the same intellectual category as late 19th Century gentlemen natural historians. The popular myth about human evolution, seemingly handed down through the generations, is that there are immense gaps in the fossil record, that hypothetical missing links are still missing, that bickering anthropologists are always changing their minds on the shape of the evolutionary tree, and that what fossil evidence we do have would fit comfortably in a small shoebox, including the stuff that has been purposefully fabricated by conspiratorial scientists out to prove that Darwin was actually right. Of course there is an element of truth in all of this, but fortunately it is only a distorted caricature of the true state of our knowledge of human evolution. It is certainly fair to concede that our perspective on human evolution is still imperfect, but this is hardly surprising given the incomplete nature of the fossil record.
This paper contributes to a debate in the palaeoarchaeological community about the major time-lag between the origin of anatomically modern humans and the appearance of typically human cultural behaviour. Why did humans take so long-at least 100 000 years-to become 'behaviourally modern'? The transition is often explained as a change in the intrinsic cognitive competence of modern humans: often in terms of a new capacity for symbolic thought, or the final perfection of language. These cognitive breakthrough models are not satisfactory, for they fail to explain the uneven palaeoanthropological record of human competence. Many supposed signature capacities appear (and then disappear) before the supposed cognitive breakthrough; many of the signature capacities disappear again after the breakthrough. So, instead of seeing behavioural modernity as a simple reflection of a new kind of mind, this paper presents a niche construction conceptual model of behavioural modernity. Humans became behaviourally modern when they could reliably transmit accumulated informational capital to the next generation, and transmit it with sufficient precision for innovations to be preserved and accumulated. In turn, the reliable accumulation of culture depends on the construction of learning environments, not just intrinsic cognitive machinery. I argue that the model is (i) evolutionarily plausible: the elements of the model can be assembled incrementally, without implausible selective scenarios; (ii) the model coheres with the broad palaeoarchaeological record; (iii) the model is anthropologically and ethnographically plausible; and (iv) the model is testable, though only in coarse, preliminary ways.
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.