Use of label 'human' in palaeoanth papers

[mg]

Hi, I was hoping someone here would be able to help me out with my research. I'm a social science PhD student looking at science - culture interactions. A particular question that I am investigating right now is the use of the term 'human' in palaeoanthropological journal literature. I have noted that recent research on Homo floresiensis avoided using the term, in contrast to papers around earlier discoveries, which seem to be happy to apply it to any hominin figure. I was hoping that someone might be able to advise me whether this change is the result of an explicit debate that has gone on within palaoanthropology, and if so, where I can read material relating to it.
thanks
Murray

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iss/research/Current-Research-Projects/Student_projects/Goulden_humanness.php

[trehinp]

Fascinating research project you have here... I went quickly on your web site and will be likely to visit it again for a more in depth reading session...

Indeed recent studies on what makes us Human that animals don't posses have made us view animals in a different perspective. Lots of experimental situations have proven that feats that we thought to be exclusively "human" (whatever that means) were indeed also part of the animal repertoire in some species.

Among those relatively recent publications I have some in French (This is my Mother tongue...)

D. Lestel, "Les origines animales de la culture", Collection Champs, Flamarion, Paris 2003

P. Pic, "La nouvelle histoire de l'homme”, Perrin, Paris 2005

In relation to your subject, I would recommend, if you haven't yet read it, the work of Elen Dyssanayake:

E. Dissanayake, "Homo Aestheticus; Where Art comes from and why", University of Washington Press, 1995

But there are many other publications on this subject which is indeed fashionable... I'm sure others here will provide additional references.

Yours sincerely.

Paul TREHIN

[lagarvelho]

Paul and mg

This is a kind of touchy issue in some ways.  I'm not sure when this usage started, but in many of the papers(and discussions) I've seen, there are a lot of people who use "human" to mean "modern H.sapiens" but will distinguish other hominids/hominins by their taxon or "popular" names,  e.g. "humans and Neandertals".  This somehow implies that the "named" hominins were not only "other", but not "human".  This implication is not lost on the reader. This is one reason why I tend to object to this kind of usage, although it does have the effect of distinguishing one group from the other.
Anne G

[trehinp]

Thanks Anne,

This is an important nuance in the debate. Of course it has very ethical implications.

In the books I was referencing, the question was addressing a far more remote in time notion of humanity. What were the capabilities that our very early ancesters possess that other animals didn't?

Actually those authors say that defining a boundary betwen other animals and human beings in a very broad sense, may be an impossible task given what we have learned about animal behaviours in recent natural and experimental observations. This is concerning other primates as well as some birds who are capable of activities which so far we were considering as significant to distinguish human beings from the rest of the animal world.

Just a few examples:
Recursive language which was thought to be strictly human has been detected in some sparrows (I don't remember the article ref, sorry).
Differences of "cultures" among chimpanzees and transmission of that specific culture to offsprings.
Development of a theory of mind observed in a specie of crows

For info there was a fabulous TV program on animal intelligence on the BBC where some of these examples were illustrated.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

Your point is well-taken.  If you really study other animals closely, you find surprising things.  And some of these surprising things are apparent capacities for behaviors that were once considered "exclusively human".  Which makes such boundaries harder and harder to define.  I don't know what the "boundary" is, but every time it seems to get definitively drawn, something seems to come along and shift it.  Incidentally, there are still people who disagree with the idea that chimpanzees actually *do* have cultures.  And no, just for the record, I'm not going to get into that argument, at least not at the present time.
Anne G

[mg]

Thanks to both of you for your input, the Dissanayake book looks very interesting Paul. As you say, the boundary is increasingly hard to maintain in the face of research in numerous fields which are undermining ideas of human uniqueness. The theoretical framework I'm using - 'boundary-work' - sidesteps the question of 'what makes humans unique?', and asks instead 'if the evidence is so contradictory, how is the boundary maintained/undermined in scientific/popular discourse?'.

As you point out Anne, the use of the term 'human' carries with it considerable implications, implications which are very difficult to support empirically, as 'human' is not a scientific category like 'Homo sapiens' is. However, at least as recently as the 1960s (Leakey et al 1965) the label 'human' seemed to be used interchangeably with 'Homo', or at least 'Homo sapiens'. More recently, Wood & Collard (1999) do similarly in their paper 'The Human Genus'.
None of the papers surrounding the Flores discovery use 'human' in this way however, so what would really help me as an outsider to palaeoanth would be any papers/articles/books containing explicit discussion by palaeoanthropologists of the issues around using 'human' as a scientific category. Perhaps though no such discussion has taken place?

[trehinp]

Interestingly enought there is another discussion about what makes human nature so different at the other end of historic times... The arguments that take place in Artificial Intelligence are surprisingly similar to those used in palaeoanthropology... 

It shows that scientific subjects of interest tend to have some common grounds in extremely distant domains... This could be considered like an extended paradigm, applying to a broad series of scientific fields. Analogies being often found with the most advanced technology that is accessible to a large public.

On the specific subject that is at the heart of your research (What makes Human nature different) I've found one of the most profound discussion in one of Isaac Asimov SF book (can't remember it it is "The Caves of Steel" or  "The Robots of Dawn") where the two robots, who are assistant of a human detective, try to understand how it is possible that the human brain of the detective, with its far smaller memory capability, with its less than perfect logicn still manages to solve mysteries while they(the two robots) who had all the information weren't able to do so...

Could it be that tenuous flare in the thinking that differenciated Homo Sapiens from Neanderthal, giving Homo Sapiens the evolutionary edge?

Yours sincerely.

Paul

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

I rather tend to doubt that Neandertals had any different "brain potential", if you want to put it that way, than "modern" humans did.  Various lines of evidence, including the discovery of "modern-type" FOXP2 DNA in Neandertals, seems to suggest this was not the case.  Of course, the discovery of this FOXP2 gene isn't everything, but to me, at least, it is suggestive.  IOW, I rather doubt that Neandertals would have been any less capable of "solving mysteries" than "modern" humans are.  Although it's quite possible that they might have had different methods of solving them.
Anne G