"I try not to make a pet out of these things. I try not to cutesify them or give them nicknames or invest any sort of personal affection for these particular beings. I try to keep that out of the work."
This anonymous participant is a paleoartist known for his reconstructions and art of hominins. He is a proponent of taking a more detached approach towards working with non-human hominins, saying, “The one thing that I do want to avoid is personifying these beings in the sense of making them fully human because they’re not fully human...I want to avoid thinking of them in modern terms.”
In his art, he focuses on using what we know of a species to inform how he depicts them. One example he gave me was a reconstruction of Paranthropus boisei, a robust Australopithecine known for having massive jaws and molars four times the size of our own, which he said he gave a “look of bovine contentment” because so much of P. boisei’s anatomy was centered around chewing.
“...if I didn’t know anything about parenting, would I come up with the same subtleties of interactive and expressions that I have there? Maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t quite get it…I don’t know if I’d quite get the subtleties of that if I wasn’t a father.”
While he does advocate for a more detached approach, he does still feel that his experiences as a father influence his work, especially depictions of parents and their children. Someone who is not a parent or has not raised a child may not have the same level of insight into these depictions and situations.
"But to make emotionless, to make beings, reconstructions, that are totally without emotion I think is not realistic because we are emotional beings. So I try to make the emotion match what we know about that particular hominin."
While we are very different from other hominins, we are still all hominins and we still have emotions. This participant chooses to look to modern-day relatives of hominins (i.e. chimpanzees and bonobos) to try to approximate what facial expressions now-extinct hominins might have had in life, rather than basing them purely off of human expressions.