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In-Depth Information
World War I-era novel with Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon love/war themes.
Desmond Morris orchestrated the gestures for the 1981 film, which includes a
lot of sniffing and head smashing. Clive Gamble suggests that the finding of
Neanderthal sites near the Somme in the early part of the twentieth century,
around the time of the First World War, may have prompted associations of these
creatures with a bestial and violent past that humans had supposedly transcended
(personal communication). More general critiques of Paleolithic imagery and
narrative cliché can be found in Moser,
Ancestral Images
; and Misia Landau,
Narratives of Human Evolution
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
51. See John Noble Wilford, “On the Trail of a Few More Ancestors,”
New
York Times
, Section 1, p. 8, April 8, 2001.
52. Alan Walker attributes this to Vince Sarich (personal communication). The
odds that any given organism will contribute genes to subsequent generations
become vanishingly small as time marches on; the use of the term ancestor with
reference to an individual hominid fossil is therefore misleading, since there is
only a remote possibility that it would have contributed anything to the genet-
ics of modern
Homo sapiens
.
53. Cladistics can also be regarded as culpable in this regard: Willi Hennig's
1966
Phylogenetic Systematics
(translated from the German text of 1950) moved
an entire generation of paleontologists in the direction of splitting—as one might
expect from a man whose expertise was beetles. The coleoptera order contains
an estimated three hundred thousand separate species, whose articulated joints
offer an excellent opportunity for quantitative digital distinction, as per the
method of cladistics.
54. Franz Boas's 1911
Mind of Primitive Man
contains a canonical formulation
of the U.S. culturalist paradigm.
55. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization,
The Race
Concept: Results of an Inquiry
(Paris: UNESCO, 1952).
56. Brace, “Fate of the 'Classic' Neanderthals.” Brace's argument is curious: he
maintains that since Neanderthals possessed culture, they could not have been
overwhelmed by another species practicing culture. He also argues, again, that
there was no ecological space for more than one cultural species.
57. Ian Tattersall,
The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know
about Human Evolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 116.
58. Cited in Richard Delisle, “Human Paleontology and the Evolutionary
Synthesis,” in
Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600
, ed. Raymond
Corbey and Bert Theunissen (Leiden: Department of Prehistory, Leiden Univer-
sity, 1995), 217-228.
59. See, for example, Günther Bergner, “Geschichte der menschlichen Phylo-
genetik seit dem Jahr 1900,” in
Menschliche Abstammungslehre
, ed. Gerhard
Heberer (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1965), 49.
60. See Tattersall,
Fossil Trail
, 116.
61. Stephen Jay Gould, “Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution,” in
Ever
since Darwin
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
