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Martin Porr and Jacqueline Matthews, eds. Interrogating Human Origins: Decolonisation and the Deep Human Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, 352pp., 15 figs, 3 tables, hbk, ISBN 9781138300415)
Human origins research is a thriving academic enterprise in which new discoveries are made at an astonishing pace, each unearthed puzzle piece promising to challenge the status quo of scientific knowledge. Yet, the interrogation of the deep human past is also increasingly dominated by the natural sciences and biology, fields which place little emphasis on reflexivity and critical thought, not least because they are strictly predicated on positivist approaches, realism, and empiricism. From a historical perspective, human origins research has emerged only recently as a distinct platform of inquiry, amalgamating strands of Palaeolithic archaeology, palaeoanthropology, evolutionary anthropology, primatology, and palaeogenetics. The root of this research endeavour is, thus, primarily ‘scientific’ rather than ‘humanistic’ and many of its proponents identify with the tenets of what is known as processualism or ‘processualism-plus’ in the Anglophone world (e.g. Davies, 2000; Hussain, 2019: Ch. 1). Together with the discovery-driven advances of recent years, this has created the impression that our knowledge of the deep human past is progressive and cumulative, and that solving the big questions of our origins now mainly depends on amassing more and better data as well as refining our methods.
What is often overlooked, however, is that more and better data cannot compensate for problematic assumptions and interpretations. With the maturation of the field, there is now an urgent need to cultivate a self-critical attitude and to begin a serious conversation about the foundations of knowledge production in the study of early human evolution. Interrogating Human Origins makes a major contribution here and invites its readership to reflexively engage with some of the main tropes, confusions, and recurrent ideas that underpin modern inquiries into the deep human past. The book is a welcome addition to the presently available, yet still underdeveloped, critical literature about human beginnings: it avoids partisanship and unnecessary ideologization, while fostering diversity and pluralism. The book probes the application of post-colonial theory to pending issues in human origins and offers a timely reminder that empirical research needs to be married to meta-archaeological reflection and conceptual analysis in order to yield robust insights. By the same...