Abstract
The concept of modernity, or “humanness,” has been difficult, if not impossible, to define. This has not prevented discussions of its appearance and evolution. In a 2003 essay the historian of science, Robert Proctor, suggested three intellectual transitions that have given rise to current understandings that “humanness” was attained recently. Two of the three transitions represent changes in the way phyletic diversity in the hominid record – the number of human species and genera that are recognized – is viewed. In this paper we explore the effect of these two transitions on our understandings of Neandertal humanity. We find that if these transitions lead to a conclusion that modernity is a phylogenetic attribute of humans, “humanness” must actually be old rather than recent and must apply to Neandertals. We propose that in contrast to the three areas explored by Proctor, a focus on major post-Neandertal demographic shifts and concomitant cultural and genetic changes presents a different intellectual foundation for understanding modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Proctor (2003:213) links humanness to scientists ideas about humanness through the unusual contention that humanness is “granted” to prehistoric forms by the paleoanthropologists who study them. To wit: “even older hominids were sometimes granted humanity,” or “humanness is often not even granted to Homo habilis.” This is an inaccurate description of how science works.
- 3.
“Humans,” that is, in contrast to “hominids” or “hominines.”
- 4.
Interestingly, he refers to this as a “demise” and not as a “disproof,” thereby denying a scientific description to refutation, the most basic scientific process.
- 5.
Earlier claims of distinct australopithecine taxa in South Africa lacked this clarity because the purported taxa were not contemporary and could (indeed, may) have represented the same lineage at different times.
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Features that are either uniquely Neandertal or very common in the Neandertal sample.
- 7.
This was incorrectly identified as Vi 80, but “80” references the year of discovery, not the specimen identification.
- 8.
- 9.
The lineage from apes to humans passed through a node that would later be allocated to the Neandertals, Haeckel named that place in his phylogeny “Homo stupidus.”
- 10.
See Race and Human Evolution (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997).
- 11.
“the radical liberalism of the1950s and 60s,” as Proctor (p. 216) puts it.
- 12.
Proctor missed the even more massive taxonomic reductions that came with the revision of the hominoid primates by Simons and Pilbeam (1965).
- 13.
Proctor is not alone in these assertions about liberalism and science, but we think that in the history of science, just as in science itself, a common view, even a majority view, is not necessarily a correct view.
- 14.
In valid subspecies, the relationship of one subspecies should be equal to all subspecies descendent from an earlier branch.
- 15.
Green and colleagues (2006: 335) use a split time “inferred from the fossil record,” citing Hublin. This both assumes that there was a populational split, and that it can be estimated from fossils.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Dr. Silvana Condemi and Wighart von Koenigswald for our invitation to attend the “150 Years of Neanderthal Discovery” conference in Bonn and to contribute to this volume. We thank the two anonymous reviews for their help.
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Wolpoff, M.H., Caspari, R. (2011). Neandertals and the Roots of Human Recency. In: Condemi, S., Weniger, GC. (eds) Continuity and Discontinuity in the Peopling of Europe. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0492-3_26
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