Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Human Recency and Race: Molecular
Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and
the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz
Robert N. Proctor
That Neanderthals are thought of in terms of a “problem” or a “question” is
remarkably similar to the way in which Germans thought about Jews prior to
World War II. In both instances, the objects of such treatment were cast in the
role of a collective “other” whose differences have been assumed to indicate the
extent of their failure to qualify for fully human status.
—C. Loring Brace,
Evolution in an Anthropological View
When did humans become human? Did this happen five million or
fifty thousand years ago? How sudden was the transition, and is this
even a meaningful question? Strange as it may seem, there is radical
disagreement over the timing of human evolution, understood as the
coming-into-being of the language-using symbolic cultural creature of
today. No one knows whether speech, consciousness, or the human
aesthetic sense are fairly recent phenomena (circa fifty thousand years
ago) or ten or even fifty times that old—though it seems that recency
currently enjoys the upper hand.
1
For many years, it was fashionable
to project “humanness” (whatever that might mean) onto any and
every hominid scratched out by a paleontologist; Lucy was “our oldest
ancestor,” an australopithecine “woman” (versus “female”); and even
older hominids were sometimes granted humanity. Today, however, it is
more common to see the australopithecines as far more chimplike;
humanness is often not even granted to
Homo erectus
, the earliest of our
genus (itself an arbitrary designation), and there are those who do not
want to see the Neanderthals or even early
Homo sapiens
as “fully
human.”
What is going on here? What makes us want to grant or withdraw
humanity from a given or presumptive ancestor? What is the evidence
one way or the other, and what larger prejudices are at stake?
