1. laelaps
  2. Meat Makes the Man

Meat Makes the Man

By laelaps on January 4, 2010.

How can you turn a monkey into a man? By feeding it "Rex" Brand Extract of beef, of course!

i-588364c28e2684845f9d4be7b7043faf-rexdarwin1-thumb-309x500-25011.jpg

i-be9edfaa5a666c875eed2bee31e9aa79-rexdarwin2-thumb-500x308-25013.jpg

I might just have to throw in a bid on this Victorian promotional card. In bizarre fashion it combines several mythical elements common to popular depictions of human origins; that we evolved in a straight-line fashion, that consumption of meat made all the difference in our transformation, and that men "led the way" in the evolution of our species. Each of these misconceptions has been cast out of the scientific arena in turn, but they still pop up from time to time, especially in advertising. Indeed, the iconic "March of Progress" will live on and I have no doubt that sweeping "theories of everything" for human evolution will continue to be proposed for some time to come. I can only imagine how depictions of human evolution we are creating now will be judged a century hence.

[Hat-tip to the Michael Barton for passing this along.]

Tags
Anthropology
Art
history of science
Primates

More like this

The March of Progress Has Deep Roots
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress." The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as…
Heroes
The skulls of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal compared, from Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man. Our species is nothing if not vain. The natural world is saturated with wonders, yet the phenomena of most concern are those directly relating to us. Even in the long public argument over evolution, where…
Being Casey Luskin
Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be a blogger for the Discovery Institute. Imagine the strain of getting up every morning, swallowing every ounce of pride and intellectual integrity you might possess, and searching desperately through the media for something, anything, you can present as…
March of the mastodons
The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper. Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be…

I had to go look up "Extract of Beef"...thanks for sending me on that scavenger hunt!

Extract of Beef. You know what, I'm afraid to look. I don't want to know exactly what they were extracting from the beef and still considering food.

Of course, if this is what turned monkeys into mankind, that would explain quite a bit about the human mind... ;-)