Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘There was this horrible language of “breeding out the colour” from full-bloods to half-castes to quarter-castes to octoroons,’ Griffiths adds. The goal was to steadily replace one ‘race’ with another.

      By the time this state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing was taking place, a crisis had already emerged within scientific circles. Since the Enlightenment, many European thinkers had united around the idea that humankind was one, that we all shared the same common capacities, the same spark of humanity that made it possible for even those of us condemned as ‘miserable’ to improve, with enough encouragement. Even if there was a racial hierarchy, even if there were lesser humans and greater ones, we were all still human. But in the nineteenth century, as Europeans encountered more people in other parts of the world, as they began to see the variety that exists across our species, and failed to ‘improve’ people the way they wanted to, some began to seriously doubt this cherished belief.

      The passage of the nineteenth century saw some make an intellectual shift away from the original Enlightenment view of a single humanity with shared origins. Scientists ventured to wonder whether we all really did belong to the same species.

      This wasn’t just because of racism. Western scientists had been funnelled into a certain way of thinking about the world partly because of where they happened to be based. In the early days of archaeology, Europe was the reference point for subsequent research elsewhere. Before anyone was sure about humanity’s African origins, human fossils in Europe provided the first data. According to John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York, this created an indexing problem. ‘If you have a series of observations, the first observations guide you more so than the latter ones. And our first observations about human evolution were based on an archaeological record in Europe.’ The first movements out of Africa were eastwards, not westwards. This is why you see elephants in both Africa and Asia. Europe isn’t where humans originated – indeed, being so inhospitable back then, it was one of the last places they migrated to, long after going to Australia. But since Europe was where the first archaeologists happened to live and work, this geographical outpost became the model for thinking about the past.

      Some of the very oldest human sites in Europe bear evidence of fairly sophisticated cave art. So as a result of indexing, early archaeologists digging on their doorstep logically assumed that art and the ability to think using symbols and images must be a mark of human modernity, one of the features that make us special. But the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe only around 45,000 years ago. When researchers then excavated far earlier sites in Africa, some as old as 200,000 years, they didn’t always find the same evidence of symbolic thought and representational art. ‘The archaeologists came up with a way to square this,’ says Shea. ‘They said, well, okay, you know these ancient Africans, Asians, they look morphologically modern but they aren’t behaviourally modern. They’re not quite right yet.’ They decided that although such people looked like modern humans, for some reason they didn’t act like them.

      Rather than rethinking what it meant to be a modern human – perhaps taking out the requirement that Homo sapiens began making art immediately upon the emergence of our species – the rest of the world’s history became a puzzle to be solved. It’s a misstep that still has repercussions today. If art is what sets our species apart from Neanderthals and others, then at what point did we actually become our species? Was it 45,000 years ago when we see sophisticated cave art in Europe, or 100,000 years ago when, we now know, people used ochre for drawing? And if Neanderthals or other archaic humans turn out to show evidence of symbolic thought and to have made representational art, will we then have to call them modern too? ‘Behavioural modernity is a diagnosis,’ says Shea. All the archaeologists can think to do is ‘rummage around looking for other evidence that will confirm this diagnosis of modernity’.

      In the nineteenth century, such uncertainty around what constituted a modern human being was taken a leap further. If people weren’t cultivating the land or living in brick houses, some asked, could they be considered modern? And if they weren’t modern, were they even the same species?

      Australia in all its alien strangeness posed a particular challenge to European thinkers. Anderson and Perrin argue that the discovery of the continent helped shatter the Enlightenment belief in human unity. After all, here was a remote place, with its own animals not seen elsewhere, kangaroos and koalas, and with its own plants, flowers and unusual landscape. ‘Based on observations of the uniqueness of Australian flora and fauna’ there were ‘suspicions that the entire continent might have been the product of a separate creation,’ they write. The humans of Australia were thought to be as strange as everything else there.

      After the remains subsequently labelled Neanderthal were first identified in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856, Martin Porr and his colleague Jacqueline Matthews have noted, one of the first things anybody did was compare them to indigenous Australians. Five years later, English biologist Thomas Huxley, a champion of the work of Charles Darwin, described the skulls of Australians as being ‘wonderfully near’ those of the ‘degraded type of the Neanderthal’. It was clear what they were insinuating. If any people on earth were going to have something in common with these now-extinct humans, European scientists assumed, it could only be the strange ones they called savages. Who else could it be but the people who were closest to nature, who had never fitted their definition of what a modern human was?

      *

      We are forever chasing our origins.

      When we can’t find what we want in the present, we go back, and back further still, until there at the dawn of time, we imagine we’ve found it. In the gloomy mists of the past, having squeezed ourselves back into the womb of humanity, we take a good look. Here it is, we say with satisfaction. Here is the root of our difference.

      Once upon a time, scientists were convinced that Aboriginal Australians were further down the evolutionary ladder than other humans, perhaps closer to Neanderthals. In 2010 it turned out that Europeans are actually likely to have the largest metaphorical drop of Neanderthal blood. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry have a very small but tangible presence of this now-extinct human in our lineage, up to 4 per cent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of humans as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans, too, mated with each other. In the deep past, it seems, they were pretty indiscriminate in their sexual partnerships.

      ‘We’re more complex than we initially thought,’ explains John Shea. ‘We initially thought there was either a lot of interbreeding or no interbreeding, and the truth is between those goalposts somewhere.’

      The discovery had important consequences. It raked up a controversial, somewhat marginalised scientific theory that had been doing the rounds a few decades earlier. In April 1992 an article had been published in Scientific American magazine with the incendiary headline: ‘The Multiregional Evolution of Humans’. The authors were Alan Thorne, a celebrated Australian anthropologist, who died in 2012, and Milford Wolpoff, a cheery American anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, where he still works today. Their hypothesis suggested that there was something deeper to human difference, that perhaps we hadn’t come out of Africa as fully modern humans after all.

      Although this notion had been mooted before, for Wolpoff, his ideas became cemented in the seventies. ‘I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked,’ he tells me. ‘And what I noticed was that in different regions, big regions – Europe, China, Australia, that is what I mean by regions, not small places – in different regions, it seemed to me there was a lot of similarity in fossils. They weren’t the same and they all were evolving.’

      Wolpoff’s big realisation came СКАЧАТЬ