As explained in Narratives of Human Evolution (and outlined in an early chapter of Bones of Contention), scientific descriptions of human evolution have often been shaped by a belief in progress and our* superiority. Even today, when descriptions are often more objective on the surface, there are subtexts in which fossils are arranged this way or that to reflect certain values and expectations.
*[Whose superiority, however, differs depending on who is speaking. This could range from our species, Homo sapiens, to just one "race" of humans (I bet you can guess which).]
Today it requires a bit of technical knowledge to parse narratives of human evolution, but it was much more blatant in the early 20th century. A fair example is Theodore Roosevelt's 1916 National Geographic article "How Old is Man?"
The first thing that struck me about Roosevelt's article was that he clearly based it upon the work of H.F. Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History, and the article features a number of illustrations from that institution. This is underlined by the fact that, in his quick review of evolutionary history after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Roosevelt wrote;
The mammals, which for ages had existed as small, warm-blooded beasts of low type, now had the field much to themselves. They developed along many different lines, including that of the primates, from which came the monkeys, the anthropoid apes, and finally the half- human predecessors of man himself. [emphasis mine]
This was explicitly Osborn's view, for Osborn had what his colleague W.K. Gregory called "pithecophobia." Osborn saw human ancestors as essentially humans of a "low" type, quite distinct from apes. What these proto-humans were like, though, was always kept vague. Osborn could not deny that we shared a distant common ancestor with living apes, but he wanted to keep that ancestor as distant as possible.
The second thing that caught my attention was a short piece of purple prose at the beginning. After denigrating native peoples that came before the "white man," Roosevelt reinforced the concept of human evolution as progress from a dirty ape struggling to survive to our present, demi-god form;
The earliest monuments beside the lower Nile and lower Euphrates, like the earliest monuments on the high plateaus or in the dense tropical forests of the new world, are purely modern -- are things of yesterday -- when measured by the hoary antiquity into which we grope when we attempt to retrace the prehistory of man, the history of his development from an apelike creature struggling with his fellow-brutes, to the being with at least longings and hopes that are half divine.
Perhaps it was impressive for its time, but such pronouncements are boringly commonplace seen through the lens of history. The reason for this conception of human evolution and the reference to Osborn's views, however, was soon revealed. Roosevelt's article was essentially a summation of Osborn's popular (in both senses) book Men of the Old Stone Age. Roosevelt heralded it as "The Most Important Book on the Evolution of Man Since Darwin's 'Descent of Man.'"
What is curious, though, is the use of the term "ape-man" throughout the article. There appears to have been a strong predilection to think that our ancestors were ape-like, even if Osborn wanted to push the idea that they were not. (Indeed, Osborn's views were so confusing that he often grew frustrated with the responses of the public he received as letters. Many misunderstood what he meant, and some even thought he was arguing against human evolution!)
Even Osborn, in captions of Men of the Old Stone Age relating to Pithecanthropus (now Homo erectus), used the phrase. Perhaps he did not like it, but it was popular and would allow readers to readily recognize his subject even if he disagreed with how apt it was.
Another fascinating aspect of the piece is a sort of reversal of an argument that had been made by an 18th century French naturalist. Roosevelt ascribed to Osborn's view that Asia was the evolutionary epicenter for mammals (including us), thus making African and Europe migration destinations and not areas where new forms evolved. This is in stark contrast to the views of Buffon made during the 18th century (to which Thomas Jefferson strongly objected), when he considered the New World to be a feeble place lacking in the species that dominated the Old World. Roosevelt reversed this, stating that the only reason impressive animals once lived in Europe was because they had migrated there. Roosevelt wrote;
The view held by some writers, that northern (including especially north-western and north central) Europe was the special center of dispersal for vigorous and dominant life types which overran the world, is without foundation in fact. Again and again within comparatively recent geologic times northern Europe has been almost denuded of life. Only for short periods has it been a center of dispersal, and even during these periods it has merely dispersed types, perhaps developed types, of creatures which in the normal course of events it has been receiving as dominant migrants and invaders from other regions.
This is as true of the "Nordic Man" who overran southern Europe fifteen hundred years ago as of his mixed-blood successors who during the last five centuries have on a larger scale overrun most of the earth, and of the parasitic companions of these mixed-blood successors, such as the rat, the rabbit, the house sparrow, and various weeds.
The great cultures and great cultive races of Europe in prehistoric times came from elsewhere, doubtless Asia. The men who used metals, who owned flocks and herds, and who grew crops -- that is, the men out of whom it was possible to develop modern civilization -- were all immigrants in Europe, who had originated and started upward elsewhere.
Roosevelt had to admit that the chief evidence for the evolution of "true" humans came from Europe, but there was one important exception; the "ape-man" from Java. But where did it fit in our family tree? Roosevelt could not be sure it was anything but a collateral ancestor, an evolutionary cousin, but it at least represented what a proto-human might have looked like. Roosevelt described Pithecanthropus thus;
This being was already half way upward from the beast, half way between true man and those Miocene ancestors of his, who were still on the psychic and intellectual level of their diverging kinsfolk, the anthropoid apes. He, or some creature like him, was in our own line of ascent during these uncounted ages when our ancestors were already different from all other brutes and yet had not grown to be really men. He probably used a club or stone at need ; and about this time he may have begun very rudely to chip or otherwise fashion stones to his use.
The illustration of a bust from the AMNH looks awfully human for an ape-man, and is strikingly different from an illustration of Pithecanthropus included in an issue of Harper's from 1900. The few fossils could be interpreted as being more ape-like or more human-like depending on what those doing the reconstructions expected to see.
Following Pithecanthropus was Heidelberg Man. It was nearer to us, Roosevelt asserted, but still grossly imperfect;
He was a chinless being, whose jaw was still so primitive that it must have made his speech imperfect ; and he was so much lower than any existing savage as to be at least specifically distinct -- that is he can be called "human" only if the word is used with a certain largeness.
The somewhat enigmatic Piltdown Man came next, followed by the crude "hunter-folk," the Neanderthals. These forms were not linked in an evolutionary series, but instead represented subsequent invasions of Europe by different kinds of humans migrating in from Asia, replacing one another through time. They were certainly not direct ancestors, but this had less to do with what the fossils said as Osborn's general idea of how humans evolved. According to Osborn our earliest representatives, the Cro-Magnon people, were heroic artisans, not idiots with clubs. They, too, were eventually wiped out, but they were ancestors to be proud of.
The article is really little more than a summary of Osborn's book, but it does provide a view of human evolution unfamiliar to us today. The fossils that had been collected did not constitute an evolutionary series so much as a chronicle of invasions of increasingly "superior" types, the new kids in town wiping out the old (just as empires had destroyed native people, thus making modern atrocities part of one long history). The actual evolutionary series linking us to our true ancestors was nowhere to be found, lost somewhere in the ancient sands of Asia, and our earliest representatives seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Osborn's view did not represent the scientific consensus, but his role as a major popularizer of science (and the success of Men of the Old Stone Age) made his views prominent. Yet even other hypotheses were fraught with problems. Even though the antiquity of humanity had been established there were few fossils to work from, and facts were sometimes stretched to fit favorite hypotheses. The lack of new material to confirm or refute particular views (and the confusion influence of Piltdown) made it easy to argue over what had been assembled than revise old ideas.
Yet even with the discovery of new fossils, old hypotheses die hard. Raymond Dart found and described Australopithecus as a hominid in 1925, but it was not recognized as such for about 40 years! The reasons for this lag are tied to hypothetical expectations, the politics of science, and the scrappy nature of the human fossil record (among other things). Indeed, the understanding of our own ancestry has not been one of unceasing progress, each discovery making a generally correct theory seem clearer, but a chaotic exchange involving few fossils and many egos.
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