Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Three Roots of Human Recency

2003; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/346029

1537-5382

Robert N. Proctor,

Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies

Conceptions of human antiquity have changed dramatically over time, with recent evidence (and opinion) pointing to the relative recencyca. 105 years agoof language, kindled fire, compoundtool use, and a number of other presumed signs of human symbolic intelligence. A concomitant change has been the dehumanizing of early hominids, a transformation visible in the separate sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and molecular anthropology. Understandings of humanity have changed in response to discoveries in these fields but also in response to struggles over how to understand race, brutality, and the oldest tools (Acheulean handaxes, for example). Conceptions of hominid and racial diversity have often been intertwined, and one impact of racial liberalism after World War II seems to have been a delay in the recognition of fossil hominid diversity, in consequence of fears of excluding one or another nowextinct hominid from the Family of Man. Racial resonances still complicate theories of human origins, as evidenced in the tendency to celebrate the exodus from Africa (Out of Africa: Thank God!). Temporal compression can be seen as a cultural artifact, and different conceptions of evidentiary prudence can be found in debates over the humanness of early hominids. Given the inherent arbitrariness in saying when they became us, the question When did humans become human? must also be seen as, among other things, a moral one.