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Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, Alterity and Human Evolution contributes to current debates on human evolution. In a political climate marked by movements such as Black Lives Matter and policies like Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 against ‘gender ideology’, this volume brings together a group of leading scholars in archeology, paleoanthropology and human evolution to examine how narratives of human origins intersect with issues of race, gender, and anthropocentrism. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.
“I am quite simply stunned by this book… I feel certain that this book will become a landmark volume .” • Andrew M. Jones, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton
Oscar Moro Abadía is a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Some of his recent publications include Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century Series (with Margaret Conkey and Josephine McDonald, Springer, 2024) and Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches and Indigenous Knowledges
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Alterity and Human Evolution: Deep-Time Perspectives on Difference and Variation
Martin Porr and Oscar Moro Abadía
Part I: Alterity and the (Biological) Species Concept
Chapter 1. Science and the Sacred
Jonathan Marks
Chapter 2. The “Other” Homo Erectus: Individuals, Identity, and Inference in the Human Fossil Record
Susan C. Antón
Chapter 3. Species as Alterity: Moving Beyond Species in Paleoanthropology
Sang-Hee Lee and Cathy Willermet
Chapter 4. Like Us/Not Like Us: Critical Theory, Anthropology, and the Neanderthal Dilemma
Brian Boyd
Chapter 5. Alternative Evolutionary Pathways of Emotional Responses in Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH), and the Co-evolution of Neurobiology and Culture
Penny Spikins
Part II: Alterity, History, and Reflexivity
Chapter 6. Narratives of “Other” in the Emergence of the Genus Homo
Lauren Schroeder, Yonatan Sahle, Sheela Athreya, and Rebecca Rogers Ackermann
Chapter 7. Neanderthals and the Issue of Masculinity: The Role of Gender in Popular Neanderthal Discourse
Susan Peeters and Hub Zwart
Chapter 8. The Hero of Human Evolution: Deconstructing Illustrations of Human Evolution and Considering the Place of Children
Michelle C. Langley
Chapter 9. Normal Is Not What You Think It Is! Challenging the Ascription of Contemporary Normativity to Patterns and Processes in Human Evolution
Agustin Fuentes
Chapter 10. Interpreting Variability, Diversity, and Alterity in the Hominin Fossil Record
Mathilde Lequin
Part III: Against Alterity: Critical Intervention
Chapter 11. Alterity Is a Violent Western Construct: In Indigenous Worldviews, We Are All Related
Paulette Steeves
Part IV: Alterity as an Ontological and Epistomological Challenge
Chapter 12. A Critical Ontology of the Archaeology of Human Origins
Benjamin Alberti
Chapter 13. Thinking about “Radical” Alterity: Why Did Animal Image-Making Disappear in Paleolithic Europe?
Oscar Moro Abadía, Margaret W. Conkey, Manuel R. González Morales, Bryn Tapper, Eduardo Palacio Pérez, and Amy Chase
Chapter 14. Paleolithic Art as a Dynamic Symbolic System: From Worldviews to Image-Making
Carole Fritz
Chapter 15. The Alterity of Deep History and the Hospitality of Things
Clive Gamble
Chapter 16. Alterity Evolving: Evolution, Cognition, and Social Ontology
Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus
Chapter 17. Multispecies Alterity: Interrogating Hominin, Animal and Techno-material Diversities of the Deep Past
Shumon Tobias Hussain
Index