Anthropology And Ethics

Christa Kuljian’s latest book, Darwin’s Hunch, explores the important – and sometimes shocking – work South Africa’s famous palaeontologists, from Raymond Dart to Lee Berger, have contributed to our understanding of early man

- Bruce Dennill

Science, it seems, can be an enabler for some nasty behaviour. Research and results are, of course, important, but in some of the cases you discuss in the book, it is such studies that give permission for the awful treatment of some individuals.

Originally, I was interested in how science was shaped by context and the period in which people were studying, in ways that could not really be established at the time. Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, for instance, were shaped by the colonial thinking that said that humans could be treated as specimens, so they authorised themselves to do certain things in that light. The definition of the word ‘civilised’ is important at all times. Those people who may have more primitive societies still have much to teach people in supposedly more developed situations. I look at three eras of palaeontological studies in the book. There’s the colonial era, from 1920 to 1940, when the focus was ‘searching for difference’ – trying to find how man past and present differed, rather than how we were the same. From the Fifties to the Eighties, there was postWorld War Two thinking, after the Nazi experiments, and the UNESCO statement on race. And apartheid came into the middle of it, with the Population Registration Act and all the rest.