Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The first is simply a call for historians of science and technology to
entertain paleoanthropology and the Paleolithic. Paleoanthropology is a
fascinating and understudied area of modern technoscience, full of adven-
ture and ideology; but so, too, at least in this latter aspect, is the Pale-
olithic itself. Prehistoric tools have generally not become the objects of
analysis by historians of technology, and the explanation is fairly obvious
(if moronic), given that the founding mytho-myopia of our discipline
(history) is that “historical” events are those that postdate the invention
of writing circa 3000 B.C. The parochialism of such an approach has long
been obvious to practitioners of oral history and archaeology, and to his-
torians of material culture and so on; but the history of tools prior to text
remains rather remarkably undertheorized—by historians, at least. I
would therefore like to make a pitch for a “deep history of technology,”
closer collaborations with archaeologists and prehistorians, a serious
reckoning with that 99.9 percent of hominid experience that predates
what historians define as “history proper” (since the invention of script),
and perhaps even an increased attention to human evolution as central
to our understanding of humanness in general. The textual turn in
anthropology in this sense needs to be complemented by a nontextual (or
pretextual) turn; we need to problematize the disciplinary divide that has
tended to isolate prehistorians from historians of technology.
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A second point is that we need to look for the political good in the
technically bad, and vice versa, the politically bad in the technically good.
The point is not that tools may be used for good or ill but rather that
political evil may be creative and political goodwill stifling. Nazi tobacco
research is an obvious case of the former (the fertile face of fascism).
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The UNESCO
Statement on Race
is, I will argue, a heretofore unnoticed
example of the latter, since one of my claims will be that the racial lib-
eralism of the 1950s and 1960s was partly responsible for delaying the
recognition of fossil hominid diversity by ten or twenty years. Let me
turn now, though, to archaeology, moving then to paleontology, and
finally to race and genetics.
Refiguring the Acheulean
In 1797 John Frere, an English country squire and former high sheriff
of Suffolk, discovered a number of curious artifacts in a brick-clay pit
in the parish of Hoxne. In a letter published three years later in
Archae-
