The History of Human Origins Research and its Place in the History of Science: Research Problems and Historiography

Abstract

Palaeoanthropology is a relatively recent science when its history is compared to that of other natural sciences, but it has grown to become a prominent field of study that has produced many remarkable discoveries and important theories. It has constructed a professional identity and formed its own institutions, while still retaining close links with other natural and social sciences. Most significantly, it has revolutionized our understanding of human origins and prehistoric human culture. This paper is a historiographical study of recent scholarship in the history of palaeoanthropology and other sciences involved in human origins research that will attempt to outline some prospective new areas of enquiry as well as some promising ways of examining that history. Historically palaeoanthropology grew out of a number of different sciences and today it still encompasses a range of problems and sub-disciplines, and therefore in this paper I include within its scope human evolution, hominid palaeontology, and prehistoric archaeology, while acknowledging other fields that have contributed to the study of human origins. Indeed, examining this conception of palaeoanthropology is one of my objectives. The dramatic changes that have occurred in palaeoanthropology in recent decades have led some practitioners to become interested in the history of their discipline and a number of recent works examine the major discoveries and theoretical developments of palaeoanthropology in the twentieth century. 1 This is not the first time that palaeoanthropologists have taken a retrospective look at their past in order to assess the current state of their field following a period of rapid growth and upheaval. During the middle of the last century, just when palaeoanthropology was emerging as a distinct discipline, scientists and popularizers of science published historical surveys of the emergence and development of human origins research that usually begin with Darwin, evolutionary theory, and the first discoveries of human fossils in the nineteenth century. 2 Most of these early works portray the history of palaeoanthropology as consisting of a series of hominid fossil discoveries and models of human evolution that changed over time as the fossil evidence and biological theories changed. Only occasionally was the history of palaeoanthropology situated within the broader developments that were taking place in the other natural sciences, and rarely do they discuss the external social factors that helped shape the history of human origins research. Despite the prominent accomplishments of palaeoanthropology and its growing stature as a science, few general histories of modern science even mention