Studying Human Origins. Disciplinary History and Epistemology, Edited By Raymond Corbey and Wil Roebroeks
Amsterdam University Press. 2001. 174 pages. ISBN 90 5356 464. (£30.35 / €42.50)
This book brings together a number of papers initially given at a 1998
University of Leiden round table. Among the contributors are practitioners,
historians of science, and philosophers, the former including archaeologists
directly involved in empirical human origins research as well as some primarily
concerned with the history and epistemology of the field.
In the introduction the volume editors highlight the two, sometimes
conflicting, approaches represented: disciplinary history as ‘history’ (putting
views and practitioners in the context of their time with the purpose of
studying the past for its own sake) and disciplinary history as ‘science’ (how
what we know today developed out of past research, how past views conditioned
or continue to condition present ones, and how awareness of the intellectual
history of controversies and interpretations can contribute to advance
knowledge in the present). In the epilogue, science historian Bert Theunissen
suggests that the latter is not really history and falls under the category of
‘scientific review’. To illustrate the point, he provides the interesting
example of the contrasting ways in which John De Vos and he worked at about the
same time on the same subject, Dubois’s Java research. Whereas Theunissen
produced a biography of Dubois as a man of his time, De Vos used
historiographic techniques to extract information from Dubois’s archive about
the validity of his paleontological collections for present stratigraphic
research.
The other science historian in the volume, Peter Bowler, tackles a different
issue. He considered whether similarities in structure between accounts of
human evolution provided by present science and those given in folk tales, or
Greco-Roman mythological and literary sources, are indeed evidence for
continuity in thinking (as argued by Misha Landau and Wiktor Stoczkowski, the
latter also a contributor to the book). Following Stephen J. Gould’s concept of
the ‘eternal metaphors’, he suggests that, such similarities are often dictated
by the logical structure of the problem, which implies that only a restricted
number of ‘families of solutions’ are possible and, hence, that researchers
come back to once-rejected types of answers independently of any knowledge of
previous debates and with no continuity in intellectual tradition being
involved. A case in point is the see-sawing of paleoanthropologists between
continuous and discontinuous models of modern human origins and the place of
Neanderthals in the human family tree.
In an essay comparing Lubbock’s nineteenth-century and McGrew’s
twentieth-century searches for analogues (primitives and primates,
respectively) to help in our understanding of the human evolutionary process,
David van Reybrouck points out that the two approaches need not be antagonistic
and provides a good example that historical analysis (placing theories in
space-time context) and anthropological analysis (placing theories in
structural context) can indeed be fruitfully reconciled. The underlying theme
of those two authors is the frontier between the human and the animal
condition, and understanding this common structure is part of the process of
understanding how the discipline dealt with the issue since the recognition
that humans were of great antiquity and their emergence part of the
evolutionary process.
Two other contributions, by Tim Murray and Matt Cartmill, the former discussing
how nineteenth-century scholars tried to reconcile the fact of the Palaeolithic
with a body of social theory where it did not fit, and the second discussing
how changes in biological classification thinking influenced the ebb and flow
between lumping and splitting approaches to hominid taxonomy, also end up
revolving around the issue of the animal/human frontier. Although concentrating
more specifically on modern human origins issues, this is also the theme of
Richard Delisle’s paper; like Cartmill, he points out the moral issues involved
in classification, namely, whether laboratory animals should be considered
hominids or, conversely, whether use of hominids as experimental tools should
be accepted.
Wiktor Stoczkowski’s paper makes the case for his ‘utilitarian’ approach to
disciplinary history as a means towards awareness of the extent to which we
often let ourselves be bound by inherited intellectual frameworks and, hence,
as a means to expand our capacity for innovative interpretation. Robin Dennel’s
review of the earlier twentieth-century controversies on Asian and African
centres of origin for humans (recently taken up in a paper for a wider audience
written with Wil Roebroeks (2003)) makes a similar case for disciplinary
history as a tool against complacency, in this particular case he argues
against the validity of the concept of centre of origin and, specifically,
against thinking about human origins in terms of conventional continental
boundaries (Africa vs. Asia) instead of ecological ones - where vast expanses
of Asia become included in a supra-continental ‘Savannahstan’ and,
biogeographically, may have been part of the story as much as the Rift Valley.
In a similar vein, the chapter authored by the volume editors highlights the
double standards used in the framework of the modern human origins debate to
exclude Neanderthals from ‘behavioural modernity’, and the role played in the
process by the reification of periodisation categories, such as Middle and
Upper Palaeolithic. As they point out, the putative non-modernity of
Neanderthals, promoted by a majority of Anglo-Saxon scholars, is framed in
exactly the same logical structure that nineteenth-century French positivists
used to deny Cro-Magnon artists fully human cognitive status.
The two remaining chapters deal with epistemological issues; one is by an
archaeologist, Geoff Clark, the other by a philosopher, Herman de Regt. The
former is a rather pessimistic view of the discipline as a battlefield between
mutually incomprehensible, strictly paradigm-bounded, ‘almost impervious to
data’ research protocols preventing the reaching of any consensus. The
philosopher’s is an optimistic, constructive empiricist critique of that view.
As the author points out (and, I would add, as origins researchers know all too
well), ‘acquiring more data is the only way to resolve human origins
controversies to the extent that they can ever be resolved’, simply
because the extent to which evidence and theory can be reconciled via post-hoc
accommodative arguments is not unlimited.
The above is a schematic rendering of essays which are much richer. I found
this book very stimulating reading and highly recommend it to any one
interested in human origins research.
João Zilhão
University of Bristol
Reference
Dennell, R. and Roebroeks, W., 2005. An Asian perspective on early human
dispersal from Africa, Nature 438, 1099-1104
Review Submitted: January 2006
The views expressed in
this review are not necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews
Editor.
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