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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 151–164

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

11. Denying Even the Tree-Structured Human Kinship

  • 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. 151–164)
When ‘the racial family tree’ reached its heyday, it came to carry strange blossoms. Paleoanthropology came of age in the early twentieth century, but uncertainty about fossil evidence and evolutionary mechanisms were part of the reason for a trend towards the underestimation of kinship between fossil and living human forms, between different fossil hominids, between apes and humans, as well as between the recent human varieties. Starting from a particularly bewildering human phylogeny by the geneticist turned anthropologist Reginald Ruggles Gates, Chapter 11 begins to enquire into these developments and their entanglement with ‘racial’ politics in the early decades of the twentieth 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.