In recent years, the study of human evolution has made substantial advancesfrom major fossil and archaeological discoveries to breakthroughs in paleogenetics and analytical methods. Yet, does more data necessarily lead to better science?
This volume challenges this assumption, arguing that advances in understanding human origins require critical reflection. Transforming scarce and incompete data into claims about the distant past demands also deeper insights into how such knowledge is constructed, validated, and questioned.
Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume examines the historical, philosophical, and epistemological foundations of human evolutionary researchfrom paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology to molecular anthropology and primatology. Rather than resolving long-standing debates, the authors illuminate the complexities behind them, encouraging a richer diversity of thought and method.
Ideal for researchers, students, and readers in both the sciences and humanities, this book invites a deeper, more inclusive engagement with the human past.
Part I. Introduction.
Chapter
1. Critical Thinking in Human Evolution:
Reflexive Approaches to the Human Past.
Chapter
2. Why It Is Necessary to
Critically Rethink How (Scientific) Knowledge Is Constructed.- Part II.
Historical Perspectives on the Study of Human Evolution.
Chapter
3.
Historical Reflections on Human Evolution in the Nineteenth Century: Beyond
Darwin and Darwinism.
Chapter
4. The Methodological and Theoretical
Framework of Early Paleoanthropology.
Chapter
5. Interpretations,
Influences, Personalities, and the Phylogeny of Palaeoanthropology.
Chapter
6. Sherwood Washburns Pragmatic Evolutionary Theory.
Chapter
7. Punctuated
Equilibrium and Human Evolution, 50 Years Later.- Part III. Historical PeFrom
Data to Evidence: Concepts, Models, and Representations.
Chapter
8. Images
of Phylogeny and Visualizations of Evolution: Scales, Trees, Networks, and
Maps.
Chapter
9. Proximate-Ultimate Causation in Human Evolution?
Implications from Archaeology.
Chapter
10. On Genetic Data, Models,
Story-Telling and Consensus: (Re) Constructing the Demographic History of
Homo Sapiens and Its Putative Admixture with Neanderthals.
Chapter
11. Human
Behavior Genetics and Human Evolution.- Part IV. Otherness and Diversity in
Human Evolution: Anthropological and Political Perspectives.
Chapter
12.
Critical Hominin Theory.
Chapter
13. Is and Ought? Problems with Deriving
Natural and Prescribing Normal via the Human Evolutionary Record.-
Chapter
14. When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Coexisted: How Philosophy,
Archaeology and Prehistory Novels Are Working Towards a More Inclusive
Understanding of Deep Human History.
Chapter
15. A Decolonial and
Multilayered Analysis on the Silencing of the Latin American Biological
Anthropology: the Case of The Peopling of the Americas Research.
Mathilde Lequin holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the University of Paris Nanterre, France. She is currently a CNRS Junior Researcher at the University of Bordeaux, where she works within the PACEA laboratory alongside paleoanthropologists and archaeologists. Her research focuses on the epistemology of paleoanthropology, with particular attention to its intersections with the philosophy of biology and philosophical anthropology.
Juan Manuel Rodriguez Caso obtained his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) from the University of Leeds, UK. Previously, he studied Biological Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is currently Visiting Researcher at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Xochimilco), and a part-time lecturer at the UNAM Faculty of Sciences. He is also a member of the National System of Researchers of Mexico. His primary areas of interest are the history of Darwinism, the dialogue between science and religion, and the development of Victorian anthropology.
