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Closing Doors and Opening Gates: Professor Ruggles Gates, “Race Crossing” Research, and the Strange Survival of Scientific Racism in Post-war Australia
In 1958, botanist-biologist Professor Reginald Gates conducted biometric and anthropometric “race crossing” studies on populations spanning Australia and Papua New Guinea. Gates is largely remembered as an anachronistic conservative whose opposition to interracial marriage and belief in race theory ostracised him from the post-war Anglo-American scientific mainstream. Paradoxically, the article aims to investigate the more positive responses that Gates, funded by segregationist American benefactors, received from Australian anthropologists interested in aiding his research. It argues Gates’ activity throughout the Global South, and the methodological overlap and collaboration he experienced with Australian anthropologists, further complicates and decentres North Atlantic facing understandings of the decline of racial thinking after 1945. Gates resurrected the legacy of the abortive Harvard-Adelaide “race-crossing” study (1938-39), in order to manufacture a tranche of data that would help serve his scientific insurgency against the UNESCO statements on racial equality (1950). Leaning on reminiscences of Harvard-Adelaide anthropologists Joseph Birdsell and Norman Tindale, Gates determined that by re-treading their footsteps, he could buttress his thesis that “races” were segregated by nature. The article demonstrates that using Australian fieldwork, he advanced his regressive political agenda that population groups, in the United States and elsewhere, should be segregated by political design. As an associate editor of the scientific racist
journal, Gates bypassed mainstream channels to disseminate his miscegenation research.
Journal Article
The Southern Route \Out of Africa\: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia
The timing of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa is a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies. Existing data suggest a rapid coastal exodus via the Indian Ocean rim around 60,000 years ago. We present evidence from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, demonstrating human presence in eastern Arabia during the last interglacial. The tool kit found at Jebel Faya has affinities to the late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa, indicating that technological innovation was not necessary to facilitate migration into Arabia. Instead, we propose that low eustatic sea level and increased rainfall during the transition between marine isotope stages 6 and 5 allowed humans to populate Arabia. This evidence implies that AMH may have been present in South Asia before the Toba eruption (1).
Journal Article
HARMONIOUS INTRUSION: MANKIND AND NATURE IN STATIUS’ SILVAE 1.3
There are three conventionally held views about the relationship between mankind and nature in the Roman villa: man is master over the natural landscape; villas were positioned at vantage points so that the downward gaze of a dominus reinforced his domination; gardens offered opportunities to bring order upon nature. This article argues to the contrary that Manilius Vopiscus’ villa in Statius’ Siluae 1.3 presents a harmonious relationship between key natural features, the villa architecture and the villa proprietor himself. Nature sometimes takes precedence, while the villa complements and integrates with the environment. This allows us to appreciate the nuances in Statius’ overall presentation of the relationship between mankind and nature in Book 1 and in other poems in the Siluae.
Journal Article
Race Experts
InRace ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman inThe
Races of Mankindseries created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Meštrović, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman'sRaces of Mankindexhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic training but also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates theRaces of Mankindexhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them.Race Expertsis a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.
eBook
Plasticity in Human Life History Strategy
The life history of Home sapiens is characterized by a lengthy period of juvenile dependence that requires extensive allocare, short interbirth intervals with concomitantly high fertility rates, and a life span much longer than that of other extant great apes. Although recognized as species-defining, the traits that make up human life history are also notable for their extensive within- and between-population variation, which appears to trace largely to phenotypic and developmental plasticity. In this review, we first discuss the adaptive origins of plasticity in life history strategy and its influence on traits such as growth rate, maturational tempo, reproductive scheduling, and life span in modern human populations. Second, we consider the likely contributions of this plasticity to evolutionary diversification and speciation within genus Home. Contrary to traditional assumptions that plasticity slows the pace of genetic adaptation, current empirical work and theory point to the potential for plasticity-induced phenotypes to \"lead the way\" and accelerate subsequent genetic adaptation. Building from this work, we propose a \"phenotype-first\" model of the evolution of human life history in which novel phenotypes were first generated by behaviorally or environmentally driven plasticity and were later gradually stabilized into species-defining traits through genetic accommodation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
The Diets of Early Hominins
Diet changes are considered key events in human evolution. Most studies of early hominin diets focused on tooth size, shape, and craniomandibular morphology, as well as stone tools and butchered animal bones. However, in recent years, dental microwear and stable isotope analyses have hinted at unexpected diversity and complexity in early hominin diets. Some traditional ideas have held; others, such as an increasing reliance on hard-object feeding and a dichotomy between Australopithecus and Paranthropus, have been challenged. The first known evidence of C₄ plant (tropical grasses and sedges) and hard-object (e.g., seeds and nuts) consumption dates to millions of years after the appearance of the earliest probable hominins, and there are no consistent trends in diet change among these species through time.
Journal Article
Is the “Savanna Hypothesis” a Dead Concept for Explaining the Emergence of the Earliest Hominins?
There is a growing consensus in early hominin studies that savannas did not play a significant role in the emergence of human evolutionary processes. Early hominins have been reported to be associated with densely wooded environments and sometimes forest, thereby reducing the importance of a shift from closed to open ecosystems in shaping these processes. In the second half of the twentieth century, two versions of the savanna hypothesis emerged: one depicted savannas as grasslands, the other as seasonal mosaic environments. Research has shown that the former is no longer tenable, but an increasing amount of paleoecological information provides compelling support for the latter. Here a critical review of the available paleoecological evidence is presented, and it is concluded that the savanna hypothesis not only has not been falsified but its heuristics are stronger than ever before.
Journal Article
Homo sapiens Is as Homo sapiens Was
Paleolithic archaeologists conceptualize the uniqueness of Homo sapiens in terms of \"behavioral modernity,\" a quality often conflated with behavioral variability. The former is qualitative, essentialist, and a historical artifact of the European origins of Paleolithic research. The latter is a quantitative, statistically variable property of all human behavior, not just that of Ice Age Europeans. As an analytical construct, behavioral modernity is deeply flawed at all epistemological levels. This paper outlines the shortcomings of behavioral modernity and instead proposes a research agenda focused on the strategic sources of human behavioral variability. Using data from later Middle Pleistocene archaeological sites in East Africa, this paper tests and falsifies the core assumption of the behavioral-modernity concept--the belief that there were significant differences in behavioral variability between the oldest H. sapiens and populations younger than 50 kya. It concludes that behavioral modernity and allied concepts have no further value to human origins research. Research focused on the strategic underpinnings of human behavioral variability will move Paleolithic archaeology closer to a more productive integration with other behavioral sciences. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Traditional Crafts. What About?
The (re)connection of contemporary society with traditional knowledge and its expression, traditional crafts, is a contradictory endeavor in itself. On one hand, traditional crafts are socially perceived as a burden, as a useless part of social life, and in the best case, as an exotic remanence of the past, good only for the hobbyists. On the other hand, as UNESCO and WIPO stated, traditional knowledge, and, by extension, traditional crafts are (or should be) an essential part of humankind’s history, part of the present, and the potential keepers of answers for future challenges. The presented paper aims to point out, mainly for general public use, the characteristics of traditional crafts and their richness. Traditional crafts might possess valuable answers for the present and future, related to sustainable use of natural resources; techniques and technologies for restoration and preservation of cultural heritage; holistic approaches in education; social and economic cohesion, especially for challenged communities. One of the main challenges in the active preservation of traditional crafts is that their protection and further acceptance at a social scale are connected with communities and not with individuals. In this respect, societies must find those instruments to address the communities of knowledge bearers and not companies or individuals. This understanding of the exceptional significance of communities in the present and future of traditional crafts is part of the solution for a desired sustainable life on this planet. Modern technologies will not offer all the answers to a dramatically fast-changing environment.
Journal Article