Dry bones: the story of paleoanthropology in South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe secular having prevailed over the sacred, paleoanthropology rather than scripture is now invoked to provide narratives of human origins. Nevertheless, given its “occult” method of making inferences about an invisible past, as opposed to an invisible future, the sacred continues to inhabit the secular in paleoanthropological discourse. This is not to suggest that the method is mistaken, but it does mean that it is subjected to ongoing revisions of its inferences and repeated rewritings of its narratives. Using scenes from Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm as a point of departure, the paper traces these paleoanthropological inferences and narratives, locates them within their sociohistorical contexts, and concludes by drawing on the notion of the unconscious to propose a narrative of becoming human that is differently angled to those delivered within the discipline of paleoanthropology, though no less occult than them.