Historical Overview of Paleoanthropological Research

Abstract

This chapter provides a comprehensive scientific historical overview of paleoanthropology as a multifaceted biological discipline. A brief summary of pre-Darwinian theories of evolution is followed by a historical report of the paradigmatic change wrought by Darwin’s perspective on life processes, from a teleological to a teleonomic view. Focusing on the fossil discoveries in Europe and later on in Asia and Africa, and on various methodological approaches, it becomes obvious that, as opposed to other biological disciplines, paleoanthropology remained until post-World War II first and foremost a narrative discipline, with widespread contemporary preconceptions (e.g., Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism) as well as erroneous conceptualizations (e.g., typological approach, orthogenism) that set it in many ways apart from the mainstream of biological thinking. Paleoanthropology is widely believed to have maintained this “iridescent image,” wrongly, as I will hopefully show. However, there remains skepticism that current theories of human origins are free of narrative components. Since Sherwood L. Washburn provided his innovative conceptual outline for physical anthropology, a theoretical and methodological change has arisen in the understanding of human evolution, focusing on evolutionary adaptations within the order Primates. The anthropological subdiscipline of paleoanthropology profited tremendously from this new approach – albeit with some delay, maybe caused by problems with the “Modern Synthesis” (e.g., the “single species hypothesis”). Intensified exploitation of old and new sites, the improvement of excavation techniques, and complex laboratory research on hominid fossils, on the one hand, and comparative research on living primates (e.g., taxonomy, biomechanics, behavioral psychology, ethology, molecular genetics, and genomics), on the other, constituted paleoanthropology as a highly innovative subdiscipline within the evolutionary sciences seeking to explain the processes of hominization, including our evolution, by concise hypothesis testing. A profound historiographical look back, as we move forward, seems helpful for different reasons: In this way, perhaps we will become more critical about the reliability and validity of our theoretical concepts, methodological approaches, and empirical basis. The history of paleoanthropology could thus help to increase the credibility of ideas about our evolutionary origins.