Paleoanthropology

History of Paleoanthropology

In the 1860s, only a few pre-modern fossils had been found; scientists did not agree upon their identification or age, let alone upon the model to explain human evolution. Charles Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species in 1859 on natural selection as a mechanism to explain evolutionary change through time. Few people yet realized the extent of the antiquity of humanity.

On the European continent, most people subscribed to the school of Catastrophism, led by the writings of French paleontologist Georges Cuvier. According to Cuvier, fossils found in different geological strata illustrated successive revolutions, during which all living things were destroyed and replaced by new forms. Cuvier and his supporters were unwilling to accept early ideas of evolution, and did not believe in the existence of human fossils. In Britain, the prevalent school of thought was Uniformitarianism, led by James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Uniformitarianism held that natural processes observable today were responsible for the gradual modification of the earth. Proponents of this view believed that the earth was at least several millions of years old. The Uniformitarian position set the stage for the relatively quick acceptance of Darwin's work and the theory of evolution as a whole.

The idea that humans had evolved from an ape-like creature was not problematic for proponents of Uniformitarianism. Many perceived a gradual evolution of humans from a form of anthropoid ape. As more fossil hominid forms were unearthed, such as the Spy Neandertals from Belgium, people began to search for the “missing link” between apes and humans. Ernst Haeckel suggested that there should have been a completely transitional form between apes and humans, one that was neither ape nor human. Paleoanthropologists of the mid- to late-19th century focused primarily on description and typology, organizing fossils into successive evolutionary stages and racial categories. This temporal and typological sorting of fossils (and living people) did little to explain why and how humans evolved in the patterns they did.

In the 1930s a movement began to form a synthetic theory of evolution, combining genetics, evolutionary theory, and populational studies into a single perspective, known subsequently as “The Modern Synthesis.” It rejected the descriptive, typological emphasis commonly practiced in zoology and physical anthropology up until that point. By the early 1950s, this major paradigm shift had a most profound effect on American biological anthropologists. Researchers began to focus on ecological change and cultural behavior as factors in human evolution. Today, paleoanthropology as a research focus spans a broad range of topics and disciplines.

The Paleoanthropological Approach

Paleoanthropology differs from paleontology in that it primarily studies human origins; because of this, the application of some of the standard tools used by paleontologists can be problematic. Early fossil humans, like other animals, were subject to evolutionary forces such as natural selection, and had to adapt biologically and behaviorally to specific environments or ecological niches. When fossil humans began to rely on cultural adaptations to assist them in survival, biocultural feedback created a cultural buffer between hominids and their environment. Because of this, there is considerable debate over what types and levels of selective forces can be used to [Page 1801]predict fossil human lifeways. Dietary habits, advanced cognitive abilities, communication and language skills, and technological sophistication all played a role in shaping human adaptation to the environment, making the concept of the ecological niche, and even natural selection, less useful as a research tool.

...