Myths, Narratives, and Folk Tales in Human Evolution

Misia Landau's 1991 book Narratives of Human Evolution had a major impact on the way we think about the science of paleoanthropology. She surveyed the early professional literature on human evolution with particular reference to changing ideas and evolutionary scenarios presented to explain the origin of the hominids, and what she found was unexpected and surprising. Most accounts of human origins included the same four events: bipedality, terrestriality, encephalization, and culture. Where these accounts differed was in the order in which they were said to have occurred, and the relative importance accorded them by different authors. At a deeper level, Landau suggested that all of these stories of human evolution followed the same narrative structure in which a protagonist is challenged and eventually triumphs against all odds. Using Vladimir Propp's classic Morphology of the Folk Tale as her guide, Landau persuasively argues for an essential similarity between the hero tale in much of the world's folk literature (as developed by Propp) and the evolutionary stories that professional anthropologists have long told about human origins. We learn that the hero is us.
What does it mean to say that anthropologists have been telling stories about human evolution? And in particular, that they have been telling the same story over and over, with the actual details changed from one version to another, but the essential elements of the story being essentially the same? Can we still claim to be doing "science" when what we write even in oiur profressional literature looks like "folk tales"? Let's discuss this in class today.