Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 141–144

Language

  • English

Print Length

4 pages

10. About Treeing…

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 141–144)
With Ernst Haeckel, phylogenetic tree building became not only standard in biology and anthropology, but the tree also entered the public sphere as the icon to support and spread the ideas of evolution and phylogeny. The phylogenetic tree was widely used in publications for wider readerships and lantern slides of tree diagrams accompanied public lectures. Additionally, the phylogenetic tree was used as pedagogic tool to teach a particular view of the living world to school children. With regard to human phylogenies, fossil kin was added – ‘Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Heidelberg Man’, and Pithecanthropus, Haeckel’s cipher for the ‘Ape Man’ that came to be associated with bones discovered in Java at the end of the nineteenth century.

Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.