The Daily Beast
Dave Einsel/GettyAlmost 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 early human. The remains would turn out to be one of the most important fossils ever discovered. That night Donald Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who discovered the fossilized remains, played a cassette tape of the Beatles and as the group listened to the sound of âLucy in the Sky with Diamondsâ reverberate through the campsite a colleague suggested that he name the female hominin Lucy. She represented a new speciesâAustralopithecus afarensisâand a visit to almost any major natural history museum in the world will give you the opportunity to see an artistâs rendition of how she appeared in her own time.Visit more than one natural history museum or flip through a handful of scientific textbooks, however, and youâll quickly notice how much disagreement there is about Lucyâs physical appearance. No one can agree on what Lucy or âAL 288-1â looked like. Why is that? In a new article on âVisual Depictions of Our Evolutionary Past,â published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, Arizona State, the University of Zurich, and Howard University set out to discover why this is and to compile their own, scientifically grounded, reconstruction.The differences in the depictions of Lucy are not small and, as the authors of the study show, reflect ideological biases about the past. For example, the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which is run by Answers in Genesis, depicts Lucy as a knuckle dragging ape. This is despite the fact that, as Adam Benton has discussed, there is a broad consensus among scientists is that Lucy was a biped who walked on two feet. As the authors of the new study write, âthe decision to reconstruct this specimen as a knuckle-walker is an obvious errorâ but it has significance for whether we see Lucy as important evidence about our ancestors or âjust an ape.âEven in less extreme cases, there are considerable differences in the way that artistic reconstructions show Lucyâs ribcage, facial features, hair, and skin tone. As Karen Anderson has written in an important work, the problem is widespread in hominin reconstructions, which âoften convey inaccurate scientific information.â Maciej Henneberg, one of the co-authors of the study, explained to The Daily Beast that depicting a homininâs body and face involves the reconstruction both of hard tissues (bones and teeth) and of soft tissues (muscles, skin, guts, internal organs, etc). Along the way, numerous decisions have to be made and these 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, Henneberg said, because âHumans communicate by looking at each otherâs faces, so we pay a lot of attention to faces of others. Thus, the reconstruction of the face of an animal or a human ancestor gives important personal information - the âfirst impressionâ of the reconstructed individual. Incorrectly performed reconstruction may change public opinion about the reconstructed fossil specimen, for example reconstructing the face of a sophisticated human like the Neanderthal (who used jewelry, cared for injured people, cooked food) using ape-like muscles and skin, makes him into a brute.ââTo make matters worse,â the authors argue, âmost hominin reconstructionsâŚ[are] presented without any rigorous empirical justifications.â Even when those involved in reconstruction describe how they based their reconstructions of facial features and body proportions âthis research has never been formally verified nor published in any scientific literature.â Ryan Campbell, the lead author on the study said via email, that the variability in how museums and textbooks depict ancient hominins âhas occurred as a result of a lack of effort from the scientific community to hold soft tissue reconstructions to the same level of scrutiny as peer-reviewed scientific research. Most reconstruction methods are unreliable or are not used in favor of artistic interpretation.â A museum visitor might think that they are seeing a rigorous piece of scientific reconstruction but often artistic sensibilities take center stage.An additional problem with depictions of our biological ancestors is the way that they tend to present evolution as a kind of inevitable linear progression towards a particular Eurocentric goal. Rudolph Zallingerâs famous March of Progress illustration, which was commissioned by Time-Life books in 1965, is a case in point. Not only does the series of images present the erroneous idea of linear progress that eliminates variety, the progression âfrom animal to ape, to ape-man to the so-called âNegroid raceâ and then to the âCaucasoid raceââ is wildly Eurocentric and racist. The same problems, Campbell and his team write, are implicit in more recent treatments. They argue that John Gurcheâs reconstructions at the Smithsonian present a similar âlinear progressionâ from one genus to the next that ends with a photo of Gurche himself, a man of European ancestry. âConsider,â the authors ask âhow young, would-be academics of minority groups feel as they are readily encountered by not just unscientifically substantiated material, but material that echoes a history of racist attitudes toward groups that look like them. One could understand how visual material of this sort can discourage interest in science.âIn their own reconstruction, undertaken over 6 years as a collaboration between the scientists and Cuban-American artist Gabriel Vinas, clearly explains the groupâs decision making process. Vinas explained to The Daily Beast âFor the image showing Lucy and Taung, we produced it to highlight how different choices in surface treatment, color, and hair quantity can differ immensely based on the whims of practitioners or their expert consultants which can result in the kinds of inconsistencies we see all over the world regarding these features.âRather than relying upon âintuitiveâ methods of reconstruction, which the team found âtoo impreciseâ they inferred muscle proportions from previous studies. They are transparent about the gaps in our knowledge. As Vinas told me: âLucyâs cranial bones are almost entirely missing ⌠âputting a faceâ quite literally to the celebrity-status skeleton can seem like a minor form of procedural trespassing; in a way, âa white lieâ that parents are comfortable telling their children.â In Vinas and the teamâs facial reconstructions Lucy is reconstructed with bonobo-like features while the reconstructed Taung child (another well-known set of remains) is shown with skin tone âmore similar to that of anatomically modern humans native to South Africa.â The rationale for the difference in skin tone, we are told, is that scientists do not have âan empirical method for reliably reconstructingâ the melanin concentration in austalopithecines. Some scientists may disagree with details of these reconstructions, but at least they (and we) know why these choices were made. Vinas added, âto remain intellectually consistent, we must say that none of these models or images in this publication should be touted as representative of the actual appearances of those individuals regardless of how technically impressive they are.âThe larger problem of bias, Diogo Rui of Howard University told me, is not unique to facial reconstruction. âHuman evolution is plagued by the use of both art, and scientist biases, and societal prejudices. They can relate to sex, or to gender differences, or to racist ideas.â The depiction of âcave menâ with sticks, for examples comes from baseless Hobbesian views about the brutishness of the past. Images of the invention of fire, stone tools, of cave painting, Rui added, only depict men as involved in these innovations. The assumption, he told me, is that women were âpassive players.â Such educational reconstructions âare hugely important,â he said because âthey are the most direct, efficient tool to perpetuate enculturation, and thus systemic misogyny and racism.â Rui and his co-authors acknowledge the important role played by museums in generating excitement about scientific work and the role of artists in producing images of the past. They note, however, that âunless there are clear plaques and context giving aids revealing that the body and its proportions are speculativeâ images have the potential to mislead the public.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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