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History of Science

Oliver Hochadel

Researcher from CEHIC

Old bones and national identities

6 october 2009

Photo: Joel Ormsby

After their defeat during the war of 1870/71 against Prussia, France continued the fight in the scientific domain. French anthropologists tried to show that the Prussians descended from an East European ‘mixed’ race and were therefore wild creatures. Some decades later the famous French anthropologist Marcellin Boule claimed that the beautiful Cro-Magnons (early Homo sapiens) were the ancestors of the French, while the Germans descended from the brutish Neanderthals.

Around 1900 many scientists believed that the measurement of the skull would reveal the ‘racial’ prehistory of people. Biology was enlisted to give some kind of ‘natural’ legitimacy to one’s own political claims. In Switzerland anthropologists tried until the 1920s to identify through scrupulous craniometry the homo alpinus. They wanted to carve out a specific identity for the mountain dwellers.

What once were serious scientific opinions have now become rather the source of amusement or bewilderment. These national animosities surely have no place in modern and hence international science – or do they? Depends on where you look for it.
Nowadays Chinese paleoanthropologists tell their western colleagues, and much to their surprise, that modern man did not only originate in Africa. In China it is virtually a state doctrine, upheld by scientists and the media that Homo pekinensis (fossils of Homo erectus found near Peking from the 1920s onwards) developed into Homo sapiens in situ. To put it bluntly: Chinese have been Chinese for more than 500,000 years.

The construction of national identity based on the evolution of fossils is not exclusive of authoritarian regimesWell, maybe this kind of constructing and affirming national identity with the help of human origin research is only possible in authoritarian regimes. Yet if we move closer to Europe we might want to pay a visit to the republic of Georgia. Several well-preserved skulls have been found in the ancient town of Dmanisi since the early 1990s. Because of their age of about 1,7 million years they have caused a sensation in human origin research – they represent the oldest hominid fossils outside Africa. In 2002, after some procrastination some (not all!) Georgian anthropologists baptized their 'ancestor' Homo georgicus. For the young republic of Georgia the fossils of Dmanisi are not only objects of national pride. These ancient bones are also instrumental for a country between two continents in claiming membership of the EU, asserting that they have found “the oldest European”.

But surely in Western Europe anthropologists do not infuse national identities into crumbly old bones. Or do they? In Spain we quickly stumble upon the famous fossil site of Atapuerca near Burgos. Discounting the skulls of Dmanisi the researchers in Atapuerca claim to have found the oldest hominid fossils in Europe: in 2007 they discovered a mandible that is 1,3 million years old. To be sure, the Spanish scientists would never claim any kind of biological continuity between the Homo antecessor, as they have named this species, and present day Spaniards the way the Chinese do.

Nevertheless they published many popular books that bear titles such as Atapuerca our predecessor or The Sierra of Atapuerca, a trip to our origins. In 2008 Emiliano Aguirre, the 'father' of Atapuerca, published a book entitled Homo hispánico. He himself would have chosen a far more neutral title but the publisher wanted Homo hispanicus. Aguirre was horrified, because that would have meant to name a new species. So the title Homo hispánico was a compromise between the marketing strategy of the publisher catering for a Spanish audience and a Spanish anthropologist who considers himself a citizen of the world.

So even in the 21st century we find these narratives of descent attached to bones. These narratives are a co-production of scientists, the media and politics. Are catch phrases such as “the first Spaniards” meant literally or rather jokingly? This is not always easy to decide but they seem inextricably linked to the politics of national identity. Spanish history is now considered to begin in Atapuerca.

Last example: Catalonia: If you ask the Catalan palaeontologist Salvador Moyà-Solà about his work, he will tell you about the papers he has just published in high impact journals such as Nature or Science. His team found remains of Miocene apes that roamed what is now Catalonia about 12 million years ago. Moyà-Solà grapples with the question how the precision grip developed in hominoids and not with political quarrels such as Catalonia’s struggle to achieve more autonomy from Madrid.
Yet the research team baptized the new species Pierolapithecus catalaunicus and Anoiapithecus brevirostris (Pierola is a village and Anoia a district of Catalonia). And as if that was not enough in marking them as “Catalan” they gave them the nicknames Jordi, Pau and Lluc.

Pau, for example, is not only a name but also means peace in Catalan. His naming was a protest against the Spanish participation in the war against Iraq in 2003. Even if you are dealing with ancient apes you cannot escape the reality of the society you live in says Moyà-Solà. Donna Haraway’s famous dictum “Primatology is politics by other means” comes to mind. Paleoanthropology, too, has been and continues to be politics by other means.

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