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The purpose of Anthropology in Practice is education, not misinformation: Evolution is not linear. The actual "March of Progress" is an illustration created by Rudolph Zallinger depicting a parade of hominids walking from left to right, evolving as they go from knuckle-walking ape to tall, spear-carrying Cro-Magnon. It was created at a time when few hominid species were known, and our course of thinking was indeed somewhat linear. Biologist Carl Zimmer writes:
Zallinger painted "The March of Progress" at a time when paleoanthropologists still had found only a few hominid species. When most experts looked the evidence, it seemed reasonable to line it up in a straight ancestor-descendant line, running from chimp-like apes to Neanderthals to us. But over the past 30 years, scientists have dug up many new sorts of hominids–perhaps as many as 20 species–and many of them don’t seem to fit in Zallinger’s parade. In some cases a number of different species seemed to have lived side by side–some that might have been our ancestors and others that veered off into their own strange gorilla-like existence. Neanderthals were not our ancestors, but rather our cousins, having branched apart from our own lineage over 500,000 years ago. And finally, a number of paleoanthropologists have taken a fresh look at some of the hominid species identified by their predecessors, and they’ve concluded that two or more separate species may have been unfairly lumped together under the same name.
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| Darwin's evolutionary tree. |
The March of Progress suggests an inevitability—that humans were the natural outgrowth of evolution. It suggests superiority, minimizing all but successes in our evolutionary history. But the March of Progress has been slow to disappear. It has been used by scientists and satirists alike to draw attention to similarities and differences in skeletons. For example, Thomas Huxley employed a similar diagram in his publication Man's Place in Nature. His illustration highlighted anatomical differences between primates. The point is that linear projections, while not accurate, are useful ways of visualizing differences, and have been employed long before Zallinger created his much copied illustration. In discussing the roots of this imagery, science writer Brian Switek says:
The imagery is just too good to resist, and our continual desire to know whether this or that fossil was ancestral to another keeps us thinking in terms of evolutionary "ladders." (A hominin clearly not ancestral to us such as Paranthropus robustus, for example, will never be as celebrated as one that might be closer to our ancestry.) The "March of Progress" is even more useful in terms of satire. What better way to show how backward or primitive your opponents are than to slot them early into the ape->human sequence or show them stamping in the opposite direction of "progress"?
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| Huxley's diagram from Man's Place in Nature (1863). |
It remains easily recognizable as a representation of evolution because I suspect it represents the essence of evolution for many people: change over time. That it is an overly simplistic rendition of this is often overlooked, perhaps because the essential meaning is so strong and emotionally wrought.
So why have I chosen this particular image, with this particular convoluted history as the symbol for Anthropology in Practice? Anthropology in practice means a few things: anthropology applied to daily understandings, anthropology taken out of the classroom, and a demonstration of how the discipline has changed. These ideas come together to create Anthropology in Practice.
When casting about for a image for AiP, The Origin of Species came to mind. In many ways it typifies anthropology in practice. It is one of the most important written pieces that looks at the world around us and explains our connections. It is anthropology applied to daily understandings. It is anthropology taken out of the classroom. And now, years later, it stands a demonstration of how the discipline has changed. We have a better understanding of Darwin's tree. The use of this banner does not in any way endorse a view of a natural progression as shown here, but invites the reader to consider change over time, whether that change is physical or intellectual.
You may read more on the formulation of the banner here.
