Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (Toronto Studies in Philosophy) by Brian S. Baigrie

Author:Brian S. Baigrie
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 1996-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

6.1 Grafton Elliott Smith’s australopithecine from Taungs, South Africa, 1925.

Elliott Smith’s picture shows how the australopithecine from Taungs was not accepted as a human ancestor by the scientific establishment. It is noteworthy that a senior evolutionary authority chose to enter into a visual dialogue and produce a picture to exclude the ancestor from the hominid lineage. His argument that Taungs represented nothing more than an anthropoid ape could not be more effectively made than it is here in visual terms. It was not so much the case that he lacked the evidence to make the case verbally, but rather that such arguments are always more convincing when made visually. In this picture, the author and illustrator have created a visual way of signifying what it means to be human. By placing the two ancestors – the australopithecine and the ‘Rhodesian Man’ – in the same picture, Elliott Smith was showing how one of these is like us and the other is not. Not only is the three-foot chimp-like australopithecine from Taungs towered over by the six-foot Broken Hill ancestor, but he passively holds a couple of stones in his hands, while the Broken Hill ancestor assertively holds a long or spear-like stick. While the australopithecine is hairy and ape-like, without clothes, hunched, and has bow legs and chimp-like feet, the Broken Hill ancestor has body hair like a human, wears a loincloth, stands fully erect, and has feet just like us. These are some of the visual symbols that are used to denote the human and non-human status of the fossil hominids. In essence the picture argues that the australopithecines were not part of the hominid lineage because they did not possess enough familiar human-like traits.

Elliott Smith was not the first to use such representational devices. He was taking advantage of a visual tradition of communication that had already been used earlier in the century. The creation of a visual language that served to characterize human ancestors according to whether they possessed ape-like or human-like features had been used to debate the evolutionary status of the Neanderthals. And it was in association with the production of knowledge on this species that reconstruction drawings were shown to be an extremely useful way of dealing with fossils whose claim to human ancestry was contested. For example, a visual language that had the power to ‘make or break’ an ancestor had been created when Marcellin Boule and Arthur Keith employed pictorial reconstructions to debate the Neanderthal’s place in human evolution (Moser 1992). Similarly, in Elliott Smith’s image of the australopithecine from Taungs, we see the use of a fast emerging iconography in which human-like and ape-like attributes were compiled and juxtaposed in order to denote whether the species in question was entitled to be labelled a ‘human’ ancestor.

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