‘People like us’: The concept of the anatomically modern human

Abstract

Orthodox theory in palaeoanthropology distinguishes between the process of evolution, leading from ancestral pongid and hominid forms to ‘anatomically modern humans’, and the process of history, leading from the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer past to modern science and civilization. The paper argues that this distinction is untenable. Comparing walking and cycling as modes of locomotion, and speech and writing as modes of communication, it is shown that these capacities cannot be opposed as, respectively, biologically innate and culturally acquired. They are, in every case, embodied skills, incorporated into the human organism through a process of development. Thus the differences we call cultural are themselves biological. The reasons for the separation of biology and culture in orthodox theory lie in the identification of the former with a formal genetic ‘endowment’. But form, it is argued, is not received by the organism at the point of conception, but is generated within the dynamic functioning of developmental systems. And through contributing to the environmental conditions of development for successor generations, organisms—including human beings—actively participate in their own evolution. There can, then, be no specification of the essential form of humanity independent of the relational contexts in which human beings become. The notion of the ‘anatomically modern human’ is an analytic fiction, derived through the retrojection, onto the Palaeolithic past, of a concept of recent historical provenance in the West. The exposure of this fiction forces a radical re-evaluation of the way we think about human evolution. An alternative approach is suggested, which takes as its point of departure the inescapable condition of human beings' involvement in their diverse environments. © 1995, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.