This book is not about paleoanthropology. It does not analyze the supraorbital torus of Homo erectus, or the feet of Australopithecus sediba. This book is about how to make sense of information like that; it’s about thinking. Further, it is premised on an uncontroversial point. Humans are universally interested in who they are and where they come from. Sharks, elephants, bats, chimpanzees, and other species are not. Or if they are, it is only in ways that are inaccessible and unfathomable to us, and always will be.
This fact immediately establishes the case for human exceptionalism. We are different from other species in that we do attempt to situate ourselves in a social and historical universe, and thereby make sense of our existence. We are sense-making creatures—that is one of the functions of our most prominent organ, the brain—and we create that sense in many different ways, culturally. The study of how people make sense of who they are and where they came from is kinship, the oldest research program in anthropology, which is predicated on the oldest systematic observation in anthropology, that different cultures make their own sense of who they are related to and descended from, and their sense-making systems somehow work. Our own ideas of relatedness are always in some degree of flux, and are particularly responsive to economy, politics, and technology.1
Our own ancestry is important to us, and the authoritative voices about it are of course those of science. Science itself is cultural, a fact-producing mode of thought, but when it produces facts about our ancestry, those facts are heavily value laden, and thus are often different from other classes of scientific facts. Understanding how those human facts differ from, say, cockroach facts, is the first step toward reading the literature on human evolution critically. And the simplest answer is, Little is on the line, and few people care about cockroach facts. (Of course urban apartment dwellers and the manufacturers of insecticides may sometimes care strongly about cockroach facts; but those cares are quite specific and localized.) In addition to being facts of nature, human facts are political and ideological; history shows that clearly. It doesn’t mean that human scientific facts are unreal and untrue—just that one needs to scrutinize them differently, because there are more variables to consider.
This is not about theories of evolutionary progress or biological teleology, which see evolution as culminating with our species, and which have been a traditionally popular way to reconcile scientific and theological ideas about human origins. These teleological theories have often been accompanied by a view of nature as a linear hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being—which sounds more erudite in Latin (scala naturae) and sexier in French (échelle des êtres). Personally I don’t think we sit atop anything but the food chain, but I don’t see how the point can be established without standing outside of the system itself, which is manifestly impossible. One such proof that I recently read explained to readers that “the history of life told by other organisms might have different priorities. Giraffe scientists would no doubt write of evolutionary progress in terms of lengthening necks, rather than larger brains or toolmaking skill. So much for human superiority.”2 But the validity of this argument against human “superiority” involves invoking a rhetorical universe of superintelligent giraffes who apparently require neither big brains to produce scientific thoughts, nor hands to write them down. In other words, the argument dethroning humans ends up establishing exactly the opposite point—because you have to invent human giraffes in order to dethrone human humans.
Our grasp of who we are and where we came from begins with an appreciation that we are the products of naturalistic evolutionary processes, but we are also not separate from the things we are trying to understand; consequently our project is scientifically reflexive. That is the central point of this book: Our ancestors were apes and we are different from them, and we want to know how that happened. We are bio-cultural ex-apes trying to understand ourselves.
This book, then, is about two reciprocal themes: how to think about anthropology scientifically, and how to think about the science of human origins anthropologically. This will be a presentation of human origins, then, which begins with recent work in science studies, to articulate an evolutionary anthropology that is consistent both with modern biology and with modern anthropology, and is more scientifically normative than evolutionary psychology or creationism. My thesis is that what differentiates biological anthropology (the study of human origins and diversity) from biology (the study of life) is reflexivity, the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that characterizes modern science. One simply cannot have the same relationship to boron or to the planet Jupiter that one has to the ancestors or neighbors. Our scientific narratives of human origin and diversity are just that—narratives, with properties endowed by the “epistemic virtues” of science, notably, naturalism, rationalism, and empiricism. Nevertheless, since they are narratives specifically about who we are and where we came from, they are simultaneously narratives of kinship and ancestry, which are universally culturally important.
I explored the genetic meanings of evolutionary relatedness and ancestry in What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee (University of California Press, 2002). My next project involved engaging more broadly with science studies. Given C.P. Snow’s famous assertion that science could be understood as an anthropologist understands culture, it stands to reason that our understanding of science could be improved by the introduction of anthropological theory and analyses.3 Recent trends in the history and sociology of science have involved integrating anthropological knowledge and methods to the extent that the field of science studies, while intellectually diverse, generally has a recognizable anthropological element. I attempted to explore the nature of science, calling specific attention to the scientific ambiguities of biological anthropology, in Why I Am Not a Scientist (University of California Press, 2011). The present book focuses specifically on the study of our origins, and situates it as a cultural and scientific narrative, with attendant implications for understanding the nature of the facts it produces.
This book was mostly written in 2013–14 during my year as an inaugural Templeton Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, for whose support I am immensely grateful. The NDIAS staff—Brad Gregory, Don Stelluto, Grant Osborn, Carolyn Sherman, Nick Ochoa, and Eric Bugyis—created a stimulating and congenial environment in which to write, and of course the John Templeton Foundation made it possible. I am grateful to the other 2013–14 Fellows of the NDIAS, who allowed me to bounce ideas off of them, and gave me very helpful feedback: Douglas Hedley, Robert Audi, Justin Biddle, Brandon Gallaher, Carl Gillett, Cleo Kearns, Scott Kenworthy, Daniel Malachuk, Gladden Pappen, Scott Shackelford, James VanderKam, Peggy Garvey, Ethan Guagliardo, and Bharat Ranganathan. I am especially indebted to the input of the external visitors to my four NDIAS seminars: Agustín Fuentes, Susan Guise Sheridan, Jim McKenna, Jada Benn Torres, Donna Glowacki, Neil Arner, Matt Ravosa, Phil Sloan, Melinda Gormley, Grant Ramsey, and Candida R. Moss. My undergraduate assistants, Iona Hughan and Sean Gaudio, also provided invaluable help in the preparation of this book.
I wish to pay special thanks to the participants in my Templeton Symposium, “The Invisible Aspects of Human Evolution,” who helped refine some of the ideas presented herein: Russ Tuttle, Rachel Caspari, Jill Preutz, Deb Olszewski, Anna Roosevelt, Margaret Wiener, Jason Antrosio, Susan Blum, Ian Kuijt, Chris Ball, Agustín Fuentes, Susan Guise Sheridan, Neil Arner, and Rahul Oka.
I am grateful as well to Joel Baden and Neil Arner for comments on parts of this manuscript. Thanks to Karen Strier for decades of encouragement. For their comments on the full text, I owe such a debt of gratitude that several people are going to get yet another mention: Susan Guise Sheridan and Candida R. Moss; Iona Hughan and Sean Gaudio. I also thank Michael Park, Libby Cowgill, and Ashley Heavilon for very helpful comments. And finally and especially, I thank Peta Katz for her help and support and love, while doing all the hard work.