The Daily Beast
The oldest woman in the world doesn’t look like you said
Dave Einsel / Getty Almost fifty years ago, on a Sunday morning in late November 1974, a team of archaeologists in Ethiopia unearthed a three million-year-old skeleton of an ancient human being. The remains would be one of the most important fossils ever discovered. That night, Donald Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who discovered the fossilized remains, played a Beatles cassette and while the group heard the sound of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” reverberating through the camp, a colleague suggested that he call the female hominid Lucy . She represented a new species – Australopithecus afarensis – and a visit to almost every major natural history museum in the world will give you the opportunity to see an artistic representation of how it appeared in its own time. Visit more than one natural history museum or visit through a handful of scientific books, however, you will quickly notice how much disagreement there is about Lucy’s physical appearance. No one can agree on Lucy’s appearance or “AL 288-1”. Why is that? In a new article on “Visual Representations of Our Evolutionary Past”, published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, State of Arizona, the University of Zurich and Howard University decided to find out why this it is and to compile its own scientifically based reconstruction. The differences in Lucy’s representations are not small and, as the study’s authors show, reflect ideological prejudices about the past. For example, the Creation Museum in Kentucky, run by Answers in Genesis, portrays Lucy as a monkey that drags her knuckles. This is despite the fact that, as Adam Benton argued, there is a broad consensus among scientists that Lucy was a bipedal who walked on two feet. As the authors of the new study write, “the decision to reconstruct this specimen as a walker is an obvious mistake”, but it does mean that we see Lucy as important evidence about our ancestors or “just a monkey”. In less extreme cases, there are considerable differences in the way artistic reconstructions show Lucy’s rib cage, facial features, hair, and skin tone. As Karen Anderson wrote in an important work, the problem is widespread in hominid reconstructions, which “often convey inaccurate scientific information”. Maciej Henneberg, one of the study’s co-authors, explained to The Daily Beast that portraying the body and face of a hominid involves the reconstruction of both hard tissues (bones and teeth) and soft tissues (muscles, skin, intestines, organs internal, etc.). Along the way, countless decisions must be made and those decisions, Henneberg told me, substantially affect how people relate to the reconstructed specimen (be it Lucy or another example). Facial features are especially important in this process, said Henneberg, because “Humans communicate by looking at each other’s faces, so we pay close attention to each other’s faces. Thus, reconstructing the face of an animal or human ancestor provides important personal information – the ‘first impression’ of the reconstructed individual. The reconstruction performed incorrectly can change public opinion about the reconstructed fossil specimen, for example, reconstructing the face of a sophisticated human being like the Neanderthal (who wore jewelry, tended the wounded, cooked food) using muscles and monkey skin, makes it a brute. ”“ To make matters worse, ”argue the authors,“ most hominid reconstructions …[are] presented without any rigorous empirical justification. “Even when those involved in the reconstruction describe how they based their reconstructions of facial features and body proportions” this research has never been formally verified or published in any scientific literature. ” Ryan Campbell, the lead author of the study, said by email that the variability in how museums and textbooks portray ancient hominids “occurred as a result of a lack of effort by the scientific community to maintain soft tissue reconstructions with same level of scrutiny as peer-reviewed scientific research. Most reconstruction methods are unreliable or are not used in favor of artistic interpretation. ”A museum visitor may think he is seeing a rigorous piece of scientific reconstruction , but often artistic sensitivities take center stage. An additional problem with representations of our biological ancestors is the way they tend to present evolution as a kind of inevitable linear progression towards a particular Eurocentric goal. Rudolph Zallinger’s march of progress, which was commissioned by Time-Life books in 1965, is an example of this. magens not only presents the erroneous idea of linear progress that eliminates variety, the progression “from animal to monkey, from monkey man to the so-called” negroid race “and then to the” caucasoid race “is wildly Eurocentric and racist. The same problems, Campbell and his team write, are implicit in more recent treatments. They argue that John Gurche’s reconstructions in the Smithsonian show a similar “linear progression” from one gender to the next, ending with a photo of Gurche himself, a man of European descent. “Consider,” the authors ask, “how young, aspiring minority group academics feel when they are easily found not only by unscientifically proven material, but material that echoes a history of racist attitudes toward groups that resemble them. One can understand how such visual material can discourage interest in science. ”In its own reconstruction, carried out over 6 years in collaboration between scientists and the Cuban-American artist Gabriel Vinas, it clearly explains the group’s decision-making process. Vinas explained to The Daily Beast “For the image showing Lucy and Taung, we produced it to highlight how the different choices in surface treatment, color and amount of hair can differ immensely based on the whims of practitioners or their expert advisors who can result in the types of inconsistencies that we see around the world in relation to these features. ”Instead of relying on“ intuitive ”methods of reconstruction, which the team considered“ very inaccurate ”, they inferred the muscle proportions from previous studies. are transparent about the gaps in our knowledge. As Vinas told me: “Lucy’s cranial bones are almost entirely absent … ‘putting a face’ literally on the skeleton of celebrity status can seem like a secondary form of trespassing; in a way, ‘an innocent lie’ that parents feel comfortable telling their children about. ”In Vinas and the team’s facial reconstructions, Lucy is recon constructed with bonobo-like features, while the reconstructed Taung child (another known set of remains) is shown with a skin tone “more similar to that of anatomically modern humans native to South Africa”. The justification for the difference in skin tone, they say, is that scientists do not have “an empirical method to safely reconstruct” the concentration of melanin in austalopithecines. Some scientists may disagree with the details of these reconstructions, but at least they (and we) know why these choices were made. Vinas added, “In order to remain intellectually consistent, we must say that none of these models or images in this publication should be presented as representative of the real appearances of these individuals, regardless of how technically impressive they are.” The biggest problem with prejudice, Diogo Rui, from Howard University, told me that facial reconstruction is not exclusive. “Human evolution is plagued by the use of art, scientific prejudices and social prejudices. They can relate to sex, or to gender differences, or to racist ideas. ”The representation of“ cavemen ”with sticks, for example, comes from unfounded Hobbesian views on the brutality of the past. Images of the invention of fire, of stone tools, of rock painting, added Rui, only portray the men involved in these innovations. The assumption, he told me, is that women were “passive players”. These educational reconstructions “are extremely important,” he said because “they are the most direct and efficient tool for perpetuating systemic inculturation and, therefore, systemic misogyny and racism”. Rui and his co-authors recognize the important role played by museums in generating enthusiasm for scientific work and the role of artists in the production of images from the past. They note, however, that “unless there are clear signs and contexts that reveal that the body and its proportions are speculative,” the images have the potential to mislead the public. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top news in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.