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A Genealogy of Paleoanthropology, Close Critical Analysis of the Historically Shifting

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A Genealogy of Paleoanthropology, Close Critical Analysis of the Historically Shifting The Missing Link as Othering: A Critical Genealogy of Paleoanthropology By Ryan Higgitt A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Sociology in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada February 2014 Copyright © Ryan Higgitt, 2014 Abstract The science of human origins, known formally as ‘paleoanthropology’, was effectively born in the fierce late nineteenth century debate as to the human status of Neanderthal. Critical social theory on ‘scientism’ has generated a wealth of research on the ways the various human sciences contribute to the structuring and organizing of social relations. This includes Foucault’s well-known genealogical studies of clinical medicine, which have provided sociologists with crucial insight into how classifying and ordering practices actually create ‘Man’ in the way they operate as a field – or “technology” – of power (Foucault 1970). However, as yet there has been very little produced by sociologists interested in the impacts of science on society with regards to paleoanthropology specifically. This is especially surprising considering that Neanderthal, the quintessential ‘missing link’ and the hub of paleoanthropology’s speculative and explanatory universe, clearly occupies a central place in the socio-historical emergence of ‘humanness’ as an ontological category. Moving forward from the basic observation that the original 1856 discovery of fossilized Neanderthal remains in a cave in Germany’s Neander Valley generally coincided with the end of the colonial period, my dissertation seeks to fill a void in sociology via a genealogical study of paleoanthropological science. Drawing largely upon the insight of Foucault but also that of Saïd, I undertake a discourse analysis of the early debates surrounding Neanderthal with an aim toward shedding light upon the ways in which Neanderthal propagated or concealed certain anxieties, particularly as they relate to biological kinships. This is then applied to an exploration of how the debates surrounding Neanderthal were in turn pivotal to the emergence of today’s prevailing paleoanthropological models of human origins. The profound ontological and epistemological tensions embodied by these models, I argue, wholly reflect the inherently ambiguous nature of the missing link as both concept and metaphor. The result is that i missing links, because of the discursive field in which they function, are a powerful source of normativity and stratification. ii For my mother and father. iii Contents Chapter One ................................................................................................................................................. 1 Theoretical Context ................................................................................................................................... 8 Methodology ............................................................................................................................................ 18 Chapter Two .............................................................................................................................................. 31 Discovery in the Neander Valley ............................................................................................................. 32 German responses .................................................................................................................................. 39 Responses from beyond Germany .......................................................................................................... 42 Chapter Three ............................................................................................................................................ 54 Gentleman of fortune continue the search .............................................................................................. 55 Crô-Magnon as Neanderthal foil ............................................................................................................. 60 Accommodating the Aryans..................................................................................................................... 67 Chapter Four .............................................................................................................................................. 72 Discovery of Oriental Man ....................................................................................................................... 73 Oriental Man as global extension of Neanderthal ................................................................................... 86 Paleoanthropology goes to the Dark Continent ...................................................................................... 94 Chapter Five ............................................................................................................................................ 110 Population Replacement vs. Multiregional Continuity ........................................................................... 111 Human Revolution vs. Evolutionary Continuity ..................................................................................... 118 Tree of Life or Web of Life? ................................................................................................................... 125 Chapter Six .............................................................................................................................................. 133 Missing Links and the modern invention of ‘Man’ ................................................................................. 134 Health of the individual and the race ..................................................................................................... 144 Paleoanthropological method as discipline ........................................................................................... 151 Chapter Seven ......................................................................................................................................... 167 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 167 Cracking the Neanderthal Genetic Code ............................................................................................... 174 References ............................................................................................................................................... 178 iv Several years ago a number of old friends and neighbors sat in my house talking. Among them was Sarah Jones, a Negress born shortly after emancipation. Two of the group, being New Englanders, were, as might be expected, discussing ancestors. Mrs. Jones listened intently. Then she turned to me and asked: “Professor, who were my ancestors?” – Carleton S. Coon (1963) Chapter One British author H.G. Wells professed in his non-fiction Mankind in the Making (1903) that “[t]he time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen … it is necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima” (p.94). Some three years after the publication of Wells’ The Grisly Folk (1921), a short-story account of Crô-Magnon Man’s primeval encounter with Neanderthals, Canadian Davidson Black (1924[1964]), writing from his Peking archaeological outpost, told his Rockefeller financers in New York that “politics is but a branch of the science and art of anthropology” (p.69). Wells and Black were committed Darwinists expressly interested in the question of human origins, yet they stand distinct from their early twentieth century peers in this explicit perception of an intimate connection between scientific rationality and the governing of lives in the modern age. Their insight in fact resonates with early twentieth century critical social theory on ‘scientism’, which, in the eyes of many sociologists, went on to find an apex in French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault’s argument that it is classifying and ordering practices which actually create ‘Man’ in the way they operate as a field – or “technology” – of power (Foucault 1970). For Foucault, ‘Man’, as something that can be studied, understood, articulated and thus managed via control of the laws which determine its nature, is a wholly ‘modern’ thing. Foucault recognized that anthropology shares a vocabulary with psychiatry as an analytic of Man. Yet psychiatry and clinical medicine were his primary concern and he was generally 1 circumspect about the ways anthropology itself operates as a mode of social ordering. To date, specific inquiry as to the role in the history of alterity played by the work of those, Wells and Black included, expressly interested in human origins has by and large only been offered by philosophers (for example Corbey 2005) and, less directly, historians of science (Bowler 1976, 1986; Desmond 1989; Reader 1988; Van Riper 1993). Foucault’s eschewal of anthropology despite the fact that anthropologists have always had so much to say about ‘others’, particularly ‘racial’ others, is likely a main reason why contemporary sociology has been practically devoid of thoroughgoing engagement with this issue. Today the anthropology of human origins is known as ‘paleoanthropology’. Since the 1856 discovery of fossilized Neanderthal remains and the practically simultaneous publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the paleoanthropological account of man’s ‘ascent’ has
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