Mesmerizing video: 6 million years of human evolution in one minute
Daily Kos
Mesmerizing video: 6 million years of human evolution in one minute
by Walter Einenkel
Back in 2013, Yale Press published Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins. Along with it they released this one-minute animation taking you through the faces of “humanity” over the past six-million years. This is the one minute teaser. The video has resurfaced because, well, it’s absolutely mesmerizing. The only face missing is the recently discovered Homo naledi.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/13/1449523/-Mesmerizing-video-6-million-years-of-human-evolution-in-one-minute?detail=email
At Daily Kos link is two-and-a-half minute, more detailed video.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Even if it's just a chronological thing, wouldn't South Americans be more recent? 
You didn't know? White men are the pinnacle of civilization. 
Cher
Perhaps the error arises in the various titles of this piece: "Shaping humanity," "Six million years of human evolution." If the title was something like "One guy's view of how he got here"--a title that acknowledges that he didn't get here without many mothers and that he didn't get here alone, with his features ('white,' blue-eyed European male), but that many different kinds of modern people arrived with him, then this video would not be so offensive.
I find it offensive. I'm Irish-French Belgian-Swedish-Kickapoo and female--that is, mostly white European female. I feel offended for myself, as a female, and for all my non-white brothers and sisters on this planet, and the REASON I feel that offense is the vicious, pervasive prejudice, throughout both scientific and creative literature, until very recently (the last couple of decades) that effectively eliminates women from the human race, and that uses the white European male as the template for all humanity, pushing all other races, including males of other races (and sometimes especially males of other races) to the sidelines of history and of modern civilization.
I cannot read or view Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" (1973) any more without a constant caveat to myself that, of course, he must be forgiven for implying that only "man" ascended. As you listen to that caveat within yourself, over and over again, not only regarding old history, old novels, old movies, old archeological and anthropology texts, old medical texts, and so on, but also regarding more recent works, like Bronowski's--and including this video--you become less forgiving. This prejudice is part of a system that has destroyed or damaged countless lives. It's all well and good to try to understand the context in which white males of the more intelligent and/or sensitive kind created their scientific or creative works, and these include quite a number of geniuses at empathy with "the other" (women, blacks, etc.). They couldn't help living and thinking within their social context any more than I can. All any of us can do is to TRY not to regard our limited selves as the center of the Universe.
If this video is "one guy's view of how he got here," fine. But it is NOT how "humanity" got here. And it is NOT what humanity is now. It is NOT an accurate picture of "evolution." And it should NOT be labeled that way.
Here is a somewhat more forgiving view of this matter, posted at Daily Kos, by commenter Ken Hymes:
Yeah, really dumb to make the end result a middle class white guy. I read some saying that the artist just happened to be a white guy. That ignores the context of a couple hundred years of crap at the edges of actual science, wherein white guys were repeatedly claiming in various intellectually confused and dishonest ways that Europeans were the end product, superior to all prior iterations. It’s also interestingly disappointing, as some have pointed out, that all of these reconstructions, in various media, seem to be of a male figure. What happened to Lucy?)
If you don’t know what positivism is, and you think this video is unproblematic, then please do go find out what that word means. We’re dealing everyday with the consequences of people believing that certain features, both physical and cultural, are the mark of a finished product, and that any group not bearing those features needs to be either segregated, “improved,” or sometimes just ignored. Here are a few examples:
The invasion of Iraq was predicated on this kind of thinking: if these backward, off-brand brown people get trained in our idea of democracy and commerce, then they will be so much better off. They’re just not as culturally evolved. But we’ll fix that. (I know, oil, but these ideas are all over the neocon discourse, and not just as an unattractive veneer. I believe these ideas are how the neocons sold war to themselves more so than to us).
The vast disparities in policing and in dispensation of law between different ethnic groups is very much grounded in the idea that people who look different have inherently different value and potential and respond to different interventions. They haven’t achieved the normative development (it is tacitly believed by many or most white Americans).
The way we are taught our own history in schools is highly shaped by ethnocentric positivism, despite recent attempts to make the curriculum more reflective of indigenous people’s experience. There is a running thread of inevitability in the entire way we look at our nation’s history: everything leads here. It is, I believe, the very disruption of that belief in the inevitable ascendancy and leadership of white men that is the cause of the right wing panic moment we are witnessing. Things are wrong because the future might very well be shaped by people who don’t look like “us.”
I don’t ascribe any ill intent to the artist — these things don’t arise from a conscious attempt to impose ideology, they come up with the rations so to speak. I also don’t claim to know what he should have done differently. Perhaps it would have made sense to offer different endings… we did, all of us, of both sexes and all ethnicities, arise from a very small group of protohumans — and we turned out looking wonderfully differently. None of us are the inevitable end product. That group of struggling survivors, learning from dogs how to get the marrow from bones, might not have made it. But they did, and they are the ancestors of every one of us. Thank goodness for all of our sakes that the current (admittedly over large) population of humans contains such incredible diversity, of appearance and outlook. We need all the ideas and perspective we can get if we’re going to survive another hundred thousand years or so.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/13/1449523/-Mesmerizing-video-6-million-years-of-human-evolution-in-one-minute?detail=email
