Feder Chapter 1. Encountering the Past

Transcription

1 Feder Chapter 1 Encountering the Past

2 Overview Anthropologists study humanity, but as a subdiscipline, archaeologists concentrate on the cultural evolution of past human beings. While archaeologists study the past using plant and animal remains, most of their data are found in the physical objects (artifacts) left behind. As to the timing of the past, grasping the actual age of the Earth, and so its peoples, was a struggle for 17 th and 18 th century thinkers, who embraced the concept of the fixity of species. With the Scientific Revolution, some western thinkers came to see the Earth was much older and that geological processes are slow-acting and of natural origins. This concept is what geologists call deep time. The past is dead and gone? Though many people assume that the past is merely dead and gone, in fact it can endure into the present in the form of the material remains of the things ancient people made and used. The sciences of archaeology and paleoanthropology endeavor to find and analyze those remains in an attempt to tell the story of human antiquity. Example: Pilfershire in Simsbury, Connecticut Consider the lost community of Pilfershire, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century village in rural Simsbury, Connecticut. When you walk through the game refuge that once was home to Pilfershire, clues of its existence, both subtle and obvious, abound in the form of walls, wells, foundations, and artifacts. A well remains, with its stone siding The foundations of buildings are also found. Artifacts, such as broken bottles, are easily found.

3 The 4 Subfields of Anthropology

4 An Ancient World Feder discusses how the past is like a foreign country. In the section called An Anthropological Perspective Feder outlines the subfields of anthropology. The age of the Earth Time is the backdrop against which the story of humanity is played out, and until fairly recently, the depth of time was unknown. Most Western thinkers in the seventeenth century believed that the world and all life within it had been established during a creation week that occurred not even 6,000 years previously. This date was based on the analysis of the Bible by Archbishop Ussher in He stated the world began on October 23, 4004 B.C.E. (before the common era). They further believed that their world was just as God had made it and reflected the perfection of creation (Grand Design). Among the most persuasive proponents of creationism was the Reverend John Ray. In the Reverend John Ray's natural philosophy the world was fixed at creation and has not changed substantially since (fixity of species). A wreck of a world Some natural scientists, on the other hand, saw the world as a wreck that had decayed since the time of creation. Viewing the world as quite young, perhaps no more than 6,000 years old, these thinkers suggested that the history of the earth had been marked by a string of catastrophes. These thinkers are called catastrophists and their idea is called catastrophism. They felt that a systematic study of these geological processes would revel some of God to them.

5 Equable and Steady Change In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the two most common perspectives of the history of the Earth were catastrophism and uniformitarianism in which the appearance of the Earth was interpreted as having resulted from long-standing, slow-acting, natural processes. James Hutton and Charles Lyell were spokesmen for the second perspective. Rejecting claims of hypothetical catastrophes, they explained the appearance of the earth on the basis of observable, slow, steady, and uniform natural processes. They asserted that such observable natural phenomena could produce the current state of the earth if afforded sufficient time. They measured the age of the earth not in thousands of years but in hundreds of thousands and even millions of years. Especially during the nineteenth century, researchers began uncovering tantalizing bits of evidence in the form of flint implements together with the bones of extinct animals and even those of human beings that suggested this ancient earth had been populated by early forms of humanity. As one of the chief proponents of uniformitarianism phrased it, the appearance of the Earth resulted from The slow agency of existing causes (Charles Lyell). These processes include erosion and weathering. Further, the idea is that the process of erosion/weathering today is the same as in the past. Delicate Arch Erosion can be dramatic

6 Fairy Stones?/Slow Agency of Existing Causes During the 16 th and 17 th centuries, in Europe, beautifully knapped stones tools were being found. While some suggested these were evidence of a stone age, others rejected this as anti-biblical. Even so, the restrictions on geological time, as thought then, challenged these interpretations. To explain, some came to suggests fairies and elves had fashioned them. John Frere s discovery John Frere, in 1797, found stone axes in a brick-earth quarry in the English town of Hoxne. Frere's discovery at Hoxne marks the first time that primitive-looking stone tools had been found at a great stratigraphic depth (12 feet). Not a few years earlier, William Smith had published work on stratigraphy. William Smith s idea was that soils occur in layers (strata) and that fossils were deposited in ordered, regular groupings. [More on this in Feder Chapter 2] More stone tools --- and bones As a French customs official, Jacques Boucher, had a passion for fossil hunting. Thought that the hundreds of flint tools he found in his excavations in the high gravel terrace overlooking the River Somme in northern France dated to a period before Noah's Flood. The flint implements he found were dated on the basis of stratigraphy. The flint tools were thought to be ancient because they were found in association with the bones of extinct animals. He labeled these stone tools as antediluvian (before the flood). Both the finds of Frere and Boucher gave evidence to Earth s antiquity and so challenged the dating of Archbishop Ussher. While James Hutton primed a change in thinking, it was Charles Lyell who stepped up next. Once people looked for it, geological evidence for deep time of Earth were found.

7 Ancient Human Revisited With Lyell as a champion, uniformitarianism became orthodox. The Earth is old. It can be read in layers. Cultures ancient and changing The fact that culture, as reflected in the raw materials used by ancient people, exhibited enormous technological change across a vast period of time, was implied by J.C. Thomsen s Three-Age System. In his system (most recent to oldest): Iron Age: Ancient technology culminated in the manufacture of iron tools. Bronze Age: Stone was replace by more sophisticated bronze tools. Stone Age: Stone tools, viewed as simplest here, were the earliest tools. Thomsen's three-age system reflected a view of cultural evolution that can best be characterized as an example of unilineal evolution. In this scenario cultures progress. They move from primitive to civilized, to greater complexity. The most famous proponent of this view was Lewis Henry Morgan. Lewis Henry Morgan thought all cultures passed through the same stages of development. Those stages were savagery, barbarism, civilization. In his view, the key characteristic that distinguished the first civilizations from previous forms of socio-political organization was the development of writing. In contrast, in modern times, anthropologists adhere to the multilineal evolution model: The view that there are many pathways a culture can take over the timespan of its existence.

8 Charles Darwin Prior to becoming a naturalist (modern term biologist), Darwin planned to be a surgeon, like his father, and then a clergyman. At Cambridge University, John Stephens Henslow saw his potential for observing nature and mentored him. It was this mentor who recommended Darwin for the voyage on the HMS Beagle, as the captain s companion. This was a planned voyage of 2 years that expanded to 5 years. An evolutionary philosophy Evolution was the focus of Darwin s work and the theme of his famous book, On the origin of species by means of natural selection. As a process of systematic change over time, Darwin was not the first to propose the theory. Like many observers of his time, Charles Darwin viewed the biological world as the result of natural processes of change. We now know that: Biological adaptations are not conscious decisions, with a long-term plan. Evolution is not directional Species do not inevitably become faster, bigger, stronger. Most species have become extinct. Darwin is famous for his finches, but he gathered data on many species, such as Galapagos tortoises. He noted that both finches and tortoises had differentiated; different islands were populated by populations with differing physical traits. If true, this challenged the immutability of the Grand Design.

9 The Origin of Species His concept (your book uses theory) of natural selection provided an overarching explanation for the diversity of life on the planet. Natural selection is a process that occurs when individual with advantageous characteristics are more likely to survive and produce more living offspring: Differential survival Differential reproduction.\ With the amount of time provided by Hutton and Lyell s perspective of earth history, the process of natural selection could have produced the great diversity of life seen on the planet, the differences and similarities among different kinds of organisms, even the evolution of humanity. Human evolution Darwin recognized how controversial a discussion of human evolution would be, so in the Origins of the species, he simply stated, Much light will be thrown on the origins of man and his history. He did address this somewhat in Descent of man, but by this time others had already started this discussion in the literature (see Thomas Huxley s 1863 Evidence as to man's place in nature). Further, by 1856, Neanderthal fossils had been discovered at Neander Valley in Germany, as well as in Belgium and at Gibraltar. Altogether, with the introduction of fossil evidence, along with the concept of uniformitarianism, many scientists were understanding that the world was very old.