Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
rather trivial sense they almost certainly are not, given the bushiness of
the hominid lineage and the fact that almost all lineages eventually
perish. You always know that a fossil had parents, but you never know
whether it left any offspring.
52
The new finds may eventually do more to
clarify the puzzling paucity of chimpanzee fossils, since many may turn
out to be closer to the ancestors of chimps than of humans.
How have such finds impacted theories of human recency? In an earlier
section, I mentioned the strong professional pressures now favoring
“splitters”: it is surely better for your career to have found a new
hominid species than yet another example of some other scholar's
already-discovered sort. Taxonomic modesty favors lumping; hubris
sanctions splitting.
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Similar pressures influence the humanity of one's
finds, since it is clearly better to have found an early human than a rather
late or precocious ape. The pressure to speak in such terms is enormous:
witness Ian Tattersall's most recent topic,
Extinct Humans
, whose very
title brandishes a concept he himself has admonished against. Perhaps
his agent cautioned him that a topic titled
Extinct Hominids
would not
sell as well.
The trend since the 1970s, however, has been to argue that hominids
prior to
Homo sapiens
were not as human as once was thought. I've
already noted several causes for this shift, but let me add to this here:
(1) a retreat from some of the more optimistic assessments of chimpanzee
cognitive capacities of the 1960s and 1970s, and (2) the view that it was
not such a bad thing to be “not fully human.”
There was also the growing sense, though, that it was not necessarily
racist to believe that nonsapient hominids were radically different from
“us.” Here, it is important to appreciate the ideological obstacles faced
by those who wanted to emphasize fossil hominid diversity. The most
prominent among these was the liberal antiracialist sentiment of many
postwar anthropologists—especially in the Anglo-American world,
where shock and horror over the events of Nazi Germany combined with
concerns that racial prejudice was still a potent force in other parts of
the world as well. Concerns such as these culminated in the first decade
after the war, when fears of a resurgence of racial prejudice led liberal
activists in the newly founded UNESCO to draft a
Statement on Race
denouncing racial theory and racial prejudice. The resulting document,
published in 1950 and in various revised versions ever since, became the
canonical liberal resolution of the race issue: race as usually conceived
