Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture (review)

The appearance of Wiktor Stoczkowski's book in English is a welcome treat for students of the history of paleoanthropology. The French original appeared in 1994, and since this time, the book has become fairly well known for its thesis that there are really only so many ways to tell a human origins story. The book is often compared to Misia Landau's Narratives of Human Evolution (1991), which also makes the point that human origins stories follow certain narrative conventions. In Landau's case, however, hominization scenarios are said to follow the story lines of the European folktale, in which a hero (a hominid of some kind) comes out of the woods, faces a challenge of some sort, is tested, and finally triumphs (by becoming human).

Stoczkowski similarly claims that origins stories fall into certain narrative clichÚs, but this, he says, has nothing to do with the conventions of European folktales. Rather, it has to do with the fact that there are only so many ways to structure an origins narrative—about two hundred, in fact, which he claims to have discovered and catalogued, including some never previously used by paleoanthropologists. Here is the structuralist's logic at work: Stoczkowski recombines this-and-that story element, trying every possible combination to the point of exhaustion. Unlike Landau, his point is not so much to explode or transcend such conventions as to show that only a certain number of such scenarios are possible.

The book is interesting from an ethnohistorical theory point of view. It is radically antihistorical (as was most structuralism), insofar as the narrative strains he identifies are considered detachable from their original context and reshuffled for use in, say, ancient Greek or modern French theories of human origins. This is your "no escape" sort of structuralism, the kind that a decade or so ago turned some people into "poststructuralists"—a linguistic abomination in its own right that I still cannot hear without cringing, given its (ironic) presumption of temporal coherence. As if we were all "structuralists" at some point, as if intellectual work all shifts when this or that "pre-" becomes properly "post-."

I'm afraid I do not really buy the line, though, that there are only so many ways to tell a story—and certainly in the realm of human origins there are ways that stories get told that do not show up in Stoczkowski's taxonomy. Where in his scheme, for example, do we fit the revolutionary prospect of humanness occurring (and perhaps disappearing) more than once? Where is the idea of humanness as applied to different races or extraterrestrials or machine or animal intelligence, or the tensions of "we evolved recently" versus "we evolved long ago"? There is no discussion of visual narrative conventions, and I'm not sure where you would even start with quantifying elements of visual cliché. Stephanie Moser's Ancestral Images is instructive here, as is Donna Haraway's Primate Visions, though there is much else to explore—the conventions of phyletic diagrams, to name just one example. Stoczkowski does have the advantage over many of his colleagues in being a remarkably talented writer.

There is a difficulty in presuming that human origins plot lines are constituted by fixed elements that float freely through history. It would seem that the primacy of "tool use," for example, means something different once chimps are said to use tools, or once we realize that "art" or food sharing or the thumb can also be tools. Stories are also tinged by situating affect, as in the presence or absence of humor, anger, or urgency in a particular account, or the myriad alternate uses to which it is put. The same story can mean different things at different times, which is why some people worry that structuralism founders in the geometric emptiness of ahistoricity. A given account, for example, might be incoherent...