Biomedical Engineering Reference
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sarily a presumption of linguistic or symbolic capacity. Hand-ax use
might have been closer to chimp ant dipping or potato washing than to,
say, sonnet writing or H-bomb building.
It is hard to say what to think about this view, that the first hominid
creations that are genuinely beautiful, displaying symmetry and undeni-
able skill (albeit perhaps only trash, or perhaps first trash and then
adapted to be some kind of tool), might have been produced by people
that were not yet fully people. It could even be that it was in perfecting
such things that humans became more fully human, although this latter
idea (“more fully human”) may make no more sense than the idea of a
creature being more “fully cockroach” or “fully chimpanzee.” If evolu-
tion has taught us anything, it is that there is no essence of humanity,
no fixed and final form. Narratives of arrival are pervasive in paleo-
anthropology, reflecting not just our understandable
sapiens
-centrism
but also the (questionable?) sense that we alone have managed to leave
some important part of nature's authority behind. The difficulty is com-
pounded, as we shall see, by the fact that more than one species of human
may have walked the earth, at several different (and simultaneous) points
in hominid history.
Racial Liberalism, the UNESCO Statement, and the Single Species
Hypothesis
Understandings of hominid diversity have undergone a profound shift in
recent decades, from a conception that there could be only one kind of
hominid at any given time, to the view that the past thirty thousand years
or so are actually rather unusual in having only one. Many paleoan-
thropologists now believe that there might have been as many as twenty
different species of hominids since our last common ancestor with
chimps, the apparent peak being circa two million years ago when as
many as half a dozen different hominid species coexisted in Africa, just
prior to the
Homo erectus
exodus.
42
That is a dramatic change from a
common view of the 1960s, defended by C. Loring Brace and others,
that the human cultural/ecological “niche” was so narrow that only one
kind of hominid could exist at any given time.
43
This older idea was
partly a political outcome of the fear of excluding extinct hominid species
from the ancestral so-called family of man.
44
But it was also interestingly
consistent with older, gradualist, ladderlike phylogenies deriving from
