Review of W. Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(4): 813-814 (2003).

Marshall Sahlins famously described Darwinism as ‘the origins myth of western capitalism’. From Stoczkowski’s book,we learn little about human origins, quite a lot about the myth. ‘Man’s ascent from savagery’ has gripped the popular imagination for well over a hundred years. The tale begins with scrawny, vulnerable cavemen cringing in cold and fear while sharp-fanged lions, bears, and hyenas stalk the landscape. At the mercy of the elements, our unfortunate forefathers are perpetually on the brink of starvation. Then comes their momentous discovery of magic ingredient X – ‘fire’, ‘tool-making’,‘language’, or ‘abstract thought’– and man’s conquest of the elements is assured. ‘Reduction of canine teeth’ gets a mention in most versions, as does ‘bipedal locomotion’ and the ‘freeing of the hands’. In the story, as Stoczkowski (p. 49) explains, all these features are causally interlinked:

If our ancestors adopted an upright posture, their hands were freed from locomotion; the free hand made it possible to produce and use tools; the tools replaced the canines in a great many functions and consequently the canines were reduced in size; learning to make tools required a complex means of communication, so language was created, and so on.

Stoczkowski does a persuasive job in demonstrating the extraordinary tenacity of all this, the basic story appearing to perpetuate itself independently of actual discoveries of fossil hominids, archaeological remains, or new dating techniques. The causality is always a bowdlerized version of ‘materialism’ or ‘technological determinism’, with ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ sidelined as erroneous science. Each postulated cause is supposed to precede the effect:

But, curiously, time is not much in evidence in the hominisation scenarios and the events that follow on from each other remain suspended in an astonishingly vague chronological space, all consigned to a more or less ill-defined period, in line with the knowledge or uncertainties of the hour, as ‘the end of the Tertiary’,the ‘pivotal point between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene’, the ‘PlioPleistocene’, the ‘lower Palaeolithic’, etc. (p. 51).

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Stoczkowski,Wiktor (trans. Mary Turton). Explaining human origins: myth, imagination and conjecture. ix, 234 pp., tables, bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2002. £45.00 (cloth), £15.95 (paper)