Archaeology 1

In second grade, I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Walking single file from the second-grade classroom to the lunch hall, beside an empty courtyard where we played at recess and where the Fall Festival’s bingo games and cake walks took place, I repeated the word “archaeology” over and over again, like a mantra, making sure I had it memorized. An impressive word. A word that said adventure and mysterious knowledge. Archaeologists, I knew, wore khaki shorts and a wide-brimmed desert hats. They were suntanned, burnt bronze, and covered in a thin layers of dust.   

Digging in dirt, making mud pies, hunting for arrowheads, these things are inherently enjoyable. Archaeology connected them to a career whose name itself was an act of mastery, multisyllabic and esoteric, a veil behind which were stored secrets of human origins. More compelling than the knowns of this branch of science (not that I had learned any of them) were its unknowns. Most important of all was the question of a “missing link,” a species between ape and human that had been wiped from the face of the planet, sometime during the Ice Age, although the hope still existed, backed by the success that science had enjoyed thus far, of unearthing revelations in the form of fossil remains.   

All of this was conveyed to me by comic-book style science magazines for children. The visual time line of evolution, running from fish to birds and horses through monkeys and apes and ape-men paused before the picture of an upright human man. That pause was like a magnet on my seven-year old imagination. I wanted to see what the missing ape-man looked like. How serendipitous it was that this could only be done by pursuing digging in the dirt to a science. Sure, the world was vast, a lot to dig through, but there must be ways or secrets or a stroke of luck that would enable me, once a little older, to find the most important, the most telling vestiges of prehistory. 

Stones, bones, pieces of tools, of broken pots, teeth, a knife for cutting, a jaw.  

A devoted humanist at age eight, I was much more fascinated with bones than stones — bifaces — or pieces of pottery. I did not know that there was another scientific field, paleontology, which was better suited to my interest in bones, nor of paleoanthropology, which focuses specifically on human origins. It was all archaeology to me. Bifaces and bits of pottery struck me as incidental accoutrement to the real mission, which was to get bones, then a skeleton, then a reconstructed image of the living creature, a crazily uncanny ancestor, who was a more or less hairy biped. Coming to terms with the importance of non-human things would become a lifelong task. It was already hiding in my impassioned misunderstanding of archaeology. John Lubbock, a Victorian founder of the field, said that archaeology “forms the link between geology and history”(1). The importance of that link is hard to grasp at first sight.  

And I certainly didn’t know that the missing-link idea was obsolete. By the mid twentieth century, the Victorian belief in a line of descent from ape to human had been replaced by a theory that gave the two a much more distant familial relationship. Victorians had wasted a colossal amount of anxiety over a mistaken idea. Contemporary anthropology believes in common ancestors, spread over a map of diverging species. Homo sapiens are separated from other primates by the vastness of evolutionary time, generations of species separations, and a multitude of extinct hominins. Not a line of descent so much as a landscape of forking, wandering rivers and streams. 

 When you enlarge the perspective on these multifurcating and many threading, dead-end lines — zoom back — then the landscape begins to resemble a swamp (2). 

Imaging attempts to grapple with this. While the phyolgenetic tree is still the best and preferred visual tool for modeling evolutionary descent, it nevertheless has limitations, since like any modeling tool of a complex system, it works by exclusion. They cannot capture convergent evolution or horizontal gene transfer. The sequencing of genomes has resulted in a need for ‘trees’ arranged in circles (2). 

 Even today, debates over ancestors are seldom settled. Just when it looked like Australopithecus africanus was the origin of genus Homo, other bones belonging to genus homo were found that were older than A. africanus. Maybe another species of Australopithecus was the ancestor, or another species in another genus of Hominidae.  Where did ‘the human’ begin? For centuries, philosophy, religion, and anthropology have tied human emergence to the ‘invention’ of language or graphic representation circa 40,000 years ago.  But in the last fifty years, fossil remains of Homo sapiens sapiens have been discovered that date back 100,000 years. That’s a lot of generations of Homo sapiens sapiens that did not have language or make images — more than twice the number of generations in the historical age of our zoological species.  

In any case, this much seems clear: when it comes to the search for human origins, it isn’t a question of the One but the Many. Now that I am adult, and an older one at that, with a lifetime behind me of rambling and vaguely remembered reading, when I look at these maps of evolutionary descent, I am reminded of one reading in particular, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari’s dense philosophical tome from the 1980s. One insistence of this vast compendium of brilliant obscurity is an insistence on multiplicity as a correction to singularity. (ADD). “Lines of flight or of deterritorializarion, becoming-wolf, becoming inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: this is what multiplicity is” (3).   

And yet, something there is the search for identity that wants it to be One, wants singular selves and singular ancestors. Or, likewise, singular mates. The more popular theory of love in The Symposium is not Plato’s Aristophanes. It’s an origins myth as well: primal ‘man’ was a spherical creature, like an egg; but the gods grew jealous and cut them in half. Now humans restlessly search for their other half, their perfect love, so that instead of being two they can be one, or in other words whole.  

How different human history would be (or for that matter, human ‘nature), if instead of needing bounded selves and dreams of holistic havens, we accepted the dark brother of of our need for change, mutability, and multiple, sometimes transient kinships. It’s an alternative organization of epistemological, psychological, and erotic desire that is already mapped out for us—  and on us — in the visual image of prehistory.  

NOTES 

1. 1. John Lubbock, Pre-historic Times; as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Remains of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, 1865; 2.  
2. ADD: Natl Geo special. Also: While the phyolgenetic tree is still the best and preferred visual tool for modeling evolutionary descent, it nevertheless has limitations, since like any modeling tool of a complex system, it works by exclusion. They cannot capture convergent evolution or horizontal gene transfer. The sequencing of genomes has resulted in a need for ‘trees’ arranged in circles:  

  

2. Ivica Letunic: Iletunic. Retraced by Mariana Ruiz Villarreal: LadyofHats - The image was generated using iTOL: Interactive Tree Of Life, an online phylogenetic tree viewer and Tree Of Life resource. SVG retraced image from ITOL Tree of life.jpg[2] 

A phylogenetic tree of life, showing the relationship between species whose genomes had been sequenced as of 2006. The very center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth. The different colors represent the three domains of life: pink represents eukaryota (animals, plants and fungi); blue represents bacteria; and green represents archaea. Note the presence of Homo sapiens (humans) second from the rightmost edge of the pink segment.  

3. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. A Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.