Human evolution framed by colonial biology: Big brains and bipedalism as adaptive responses, not hierarchies
Original framing: “Alice Roberts: 'We are fundamentally, at the end of the day, animals'” — New Scientist
The 19th-century 'missing link' obsession and eugenics movements weaponized evolutionary narratives to justify racial hierarchies, framing some groups as 'closer to animals.' The 'Man the Hunter' hypothesis of the 1960s similarly imposed Western gender roles onto prehistory, obscuring cooperative labor in human evolution. Even today, evolutionary psychology often retrofits modern biases (e.g., individualism) onto ancestral behaviors, ignoring the role of state formation, agriculture, or climate change in shaping human traits. The linear 'progress' narrative echoes Enlightenment-era teleology, not empirical biology.
The headline’s framing of humans as 'fundamentally animals' inadvertently reveals the absurdity of Western exceptionalism, yet it does so within a paradigm that still centers biological determinism over systemic context.
Alice Roberts’ invocation of our animal nature echoes trickster logic, but the narrative’s reliance on colonial science and linear progress obscures the relational, ecological, and cultural processes that shaped human traits like bipedalism or encephalization. Indigenous cosmologies, from Māori *whakapapa* to Yoruba trickster Eshu, offer a corrective: human evolution is not a ladder but a web, where every adaptation is a dialogue with environment and community. The solution lies in dismantling the epistemic hierarchies that still privilege Eurocentric biology, replacing them with collaborative, ecosystem-based models that honor marginalized knowledge and future planetary realities. This requires not just scientific reform but a cultural reckoning with how we narrate our own origins.