Paleoanthropological Futures and Historical Pasts: Human Origins and Rewriting the Place of Africa in World History

The science writer Robert Ardrey began his 1961 book African Genesis with the arresting line: “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.” But by the end of the decade, it might have been unnecessary to include the second intervening phrase. Although the “out of Asia” hypothesis of human origins dominated models of human origins and prehistoric migration from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, it was rapidly replaced in both scientific circles and public awareness by the theory of African origins in the 1950s and was all but forgotten by the end of the 1960s. This talk explains how the rapid pivot from Asia to Africa could take place and examines the historiographic deployment of African origins in new world history writing in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to understand how the monumental history of the Asian origins hypothesis came to be so rapidly forgotten. In highlighting the position of hominin fossil evidence within this historiography, the goal is not to critique the use of non-textual sources in history writing, or the implications of writing history in a long temporal perspective, but rather to call attention to the “extra-objective” status that certain kinds of scientific knowledge were sometimes granted—and to show the implications of this method for how we understand the intellectual and cultural history of the out of Africa hypothesis.