IngentaConnect Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives: William Sollas'...

Author: Sommer, Marianne¹

Source: Journal of the History of Biology, Volume 38, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 327-365(39)

Publisher: Springer

Abstract:

During the first decades of the 20th century, many anthropologists who had previously adhered to a linear view of human evolution, from an ape via Pithecanthropus erectus(today Homo erectus) and Neanderthal to modern humans, began to change their outlook. A shift towards a branching model of human evolution began to take hold. Among the scientific factors motivating this trend was the insight that mammalian evolution in general was best represented by a branching tree, rather than by a straight line, and that several new fossil hominids were discovered that differed significantly in their morphology but seemed to date from about the same period. The ideological and practical implications of imperialism and WWI have also been identified as formative of the new evolutionary scenarios in which racial conflict played a crucial role. The paper will illustrate this general shift in anthropological theory for one particular scientist, William Sollas (1849–1936). Sollas achieved a synthesis of human morphological and cultural evolution in what I will refer to as an imperialist model. In this theoretical framework, migration, conflict, and replacement became the main mechanisms for progress spurred by ‘ 8nature’s tyrant,’ natural selection.

Keywords: anthropology; beginning of 20th century; Britain; diversity vs. linearity; Grafton Elliot Smith; Gustav Schwalbe; Henri Breuil; human evolution; ideology; imperialism; Marcellin Boule; Neanderthal; phylogenetic trees; Piltdown; Pithecanthropus; race; Thomas Henry Huxley; William Sollas; WWI

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1007/s10739-004-5428-2

Affiliations: 1: Science Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zentrum RAC, Rämistrasse 36, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland, Email: sommer@wiss.gess.ethz.ch

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Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives: William Sollas’s (1849–1936) Anthropology from Disappointed Bridge to Trunkless Tree and the Instrumentalisation of Racial Conflict