Explaining Human Origins. Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture by Wiktor Stoczkowski

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By Wiktor Stoczkowski

The writer argues that theories of human origins built through archaeologists and actual anthropologists from the early 19th century to the current day are structurally just like Western people theories, and to the speculations of past philosophers. Reviewing a notable variety of thinkers writing in numerous eu languages, he criticizes the shortcoming of improvement in theories of human origins, yet concludes hopefully that the facility of the medical technique will bring extra trustworthy theories--only whether it is aware of the bags it consists of over from renowned discourse.

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The idea of the animal – we should rather say bestial – condition of our ancestors is part of the classic legacy of conjectural anthropology (this conception may be quite unconnected with the theory of species transformation; cf. chapter ).  Here we have a definition by negatives, in which every item expresses the non-existence of ‘typical’ manifestations of culture. So the bearers of those attributes find themselves again confined to the state of nature, represented in         –, I: –.

So excavators often directed their steps first towards caves, thought to be unique archives of prehistory and the sole dwelling place of our ancestors. The idea of the caveman is therefore more ancient than the excavations of caves; we must suspect that it is not their result, but rather their cause, or at least one of them.  Nowadays we can judge the extent to which these researches were incomplete and how many sites outside caves passed unnoticed. –; Lucretius : , v. . Homer : , IX: –.

Causality seems to have operated in reverse here: it was the idea of ‘caveman’ that induced the early prehistorians to explore caves in the first place. For we must remember that caves had already been designated   Buffon, trans. Smellie , III: . The schoolbooks constantly mention ‘huge bears and fierce lions’ or ‘enormous animals’, Korovkin : ; Bazylevic et al. : .  In the eighteenth century, cave dwelling continued to be considered as one of the chief characteristics of animals, with which the earliest humans – depicted as semi-bestial creatures – were readily compared.

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