Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of the Paleolithic, especially in its popularization by the media. The polit-
ical resonances of the out-of-Africa idea are not so simple, however.
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There is also a sometimes rather subtle implication that Africa is a good
place
to be from
. I call this “Out-of-Africa: Thank God!” insofar as there
is an implication that hominids became
Homo sapiens
in the process of
leaving Africa, a slight that seems always to be unintentional, yet is sur-
prisingly common. Just to give one example: In his otherwise-astute
paper critiquing (inter alia) “Proto-World” paleo-linguistic theories for
the 2001 Summer Academy on Human Origins in Berlin, Jürgen Trabant
of Humboldt University wrote that Proto-World “would be the language
of that group of humans which made it out of Africa.” His intention was
simply to characterize (and critique) the assumption by Luigi Luca
Cavalli-Sforza and others that all the languages of the world might share
some common distant root, but the accidental implication was that in
the process of becoming modern, everyone left Africa.
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There also appears to be support for recency from those who reject
the single species hypothesis. Hominid bushiness seems to reopen one of
the questions at the root of the UNESCO statement: How deep can
human biodiversity go? Hominid bushiness not only raises the difficult
question of what it must have been like to have multiple species of
humans living at the same time but also the question, How far back into
the hominid past can one reasonably project human qualities?
There are two things that we can be sure of: (1) the history of science
is often a history of confusion, and (2) ideologies often come in cum-
bersome packages. Arguments developed for dealing with racial differ-
ences and prejudices have been projected onto dealings with fossil
hominid diversity; that was true before the UNESCO statement on race,
but it is also true afterward. There are those who feel that it is morally
wrong to claim that the Neanderthals, for example, were anything less
than fully human.
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No one can deny that the bestial impregnation of
this species in the early part of the twentieth century was wrong in many
respects, but their refitting with flowers (say, in 1969 at the Shanidar site
in Iraq, where pollen was found in a grave, whence the “flower child of
Shanidar”) may eventually seem just as quaint, if rather more pleasant.
The Neanderthals may or may not have bred with “us” (the molecular
evidence suggests they didn't); their replacement by “us” may have been
peaceful or bloody (there is no evidence one way or the other). What we
