Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Here, I would like to explore some of the separate lines of argument
leading to the idea that humanness is a relatively recent phenomenon—
no more than 150,000 years, and perhaps even as recent as 50,000 years,
since that is when we find the first self-representation, compound tools,
and other signs of human intelligence or symbolic behavior. Now, I don't
want to get bogged down in definitions—and to avoid doing so, let me
operationalize humanness by equating it for a moment with language
and culture—recognizing also that these categories are no more secure,
no less in flux, than
Menschlichkeit
: witness the recent work on “chim-
panzee material culture” that casts the traditional Boasian concept in an
altogether different light from how U.S. anthropologists have regarded
this category.
2
Let me simply set aside some of these definitional issues
for the moment, to make sure I get across the novelty implicit in recent
thinking with regard to human recency.
Just to give a couple of examples: it was widely thought several
decades ago that the two- and three-million-year-old hominid fossils
being found in Africa had “culture” in the Boasian sense—including
folkways and mores, fables and religion, and so forth. Humanness in the
wake of the 1950 UNESCO
Statement on Race
was pushed back even
into the middle Miocene—as when Louis Leakey and many others sug-
gested that
Ramapithecus
circa fourteen million years ago was a hominid
and tool user—both of which were taken to mean that the creature
was human in some deep and inclusive sense.
3
By the mid-1970s, the
hominid status of Ramapithecus had been sanctified by “millions of text-
books and
Time-Life
volumes on human evolution.”
4
The equation of
hominid and humanity fit with the older tradition of humans as an evo-
lutionary
Sonderweg
: only humans use tools, tool use implies language,
language implies culture, language and culture are unique to humanity,
and so forth; it also had certain advantages for career-conscious fossil
finders, since it was surely preferable to have found some kind of human
rather than some kind of chimp. It was not until the 1960s that Allan
Wilson and Vince Sarich showed that humans shared a common ances-
tor with chimps as recently as five to six million years ago—and not until
the 1980s that this idea was widely accepted.
5
(A few maverick evolu-
tionists as recently as the 1960s could maintain that humans and apes
had not shared an ancestor since the Eocene—roughly fifty million years
ago by modern counts.) It is also noteworthy that it took a racial ine-
