#sapientparadox

Radical AnthropologyOn the occasion of the death of world famous <a href="https://c.im/tags/Neolithic" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Neolithic</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/archaeologist" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#archaeologist</a> and Tory peer <a href="https://c.im/tags/ColinRenfrew" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ColinRenfrew</a> we have a few things to say.Looking down at us from the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cambridge" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cambridge</a> high table, he made some severe misjudgements. His <a href="https://c.im/tags/sapientparadox" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#sapientparadox</a> was an attempt to argue that while <a href="https://c.im/tags/Homosapiens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Homosapiens</a> bodies evolved in <a href="https://c.im/tags/Africa" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Africa</a>, somehow we didn't get smart till we hit <a href="https://c.im/tags/Europe" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Europe</a>. Also highly questionable was his attitude to the <a href="https://c.im/tags/cognition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#cognition</a> of <a href="https://c.im/tags/huntergatherers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#huntergatherers</a> who, so he said, 'lacked fully developed mind'. According to him, they needed to borrow language from farmers. We had some big political and social institutional differences with Renfrew. Our own Chris Knight goes through the whole context in a review below<a href="https://c.im/tags/archaeology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#archaeology</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Renfrew" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Renfrew</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#racism</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Indigenous" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Indigenous</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Palaeolithic" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Palaeolithic</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/humanorigins" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#humanorigins</a>JRAI 2002, 8: 807-8 A devastating review by Chris Knight of the Runciman collection 'The Origin of Human Social Institutions'

Radical AnthropologyIn 'Before The Dawn of Everything', archaeologist <a href="https://c.im/tags/IanWatts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IanWatts</a> questions Graeber and Wengrow's premise that searching for original human society 'can only be a matter of myth-making'. He argues, for Graeber and Wengrow, a ‘single human “us” can only be inferred from ~30,000 years ago'. The actual stretch of time when we became all-singing, all-dancing, language-speaking symbolic culture-bearing humans -- in Africa-- is abandoned as unknowable. The latest archaeological findings and their interpretation suggest pan-African habitual performance of collective ritual, with a uniform signature of red cosmetic usage, from ~160,000 years ago around the end of speciation, grounding symbolic culture’s first shared imaginaries. While <a href="https://c.im/tags/TheDawnofEverything" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#TheDawnofEverything</a> was clearly intended to be collectively empowering, it marginalises evolutionary theory, the archaeology of our speciation and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. Thereby, it resembles the decried ‘sapient paradox’! That is the fairly racist (!) idea that we got human bodies in Africa but had to reach Europe to show intelligence (or interesting archaeology!) <a href="https://c.im/tags/archaeology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#archaeology</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/humanorigins" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#humanorigins</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Africa" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Africa</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/MiddleStoneAge" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#MiddleStoneAge</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/sapientparadox" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#sapientparadox</a><a href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.3" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.3</a>

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