Reaching Back Through Our History

How do professionals in paleoanthropology and adjacent to the field (i.e. paleoartists, prehistoric fiction writers, museum employees, etc.) interact with the individuals and species they work with? How is this related to and influenced by their personal identities and experiences?

I am physically disabled and learning about and connecting to individuals like Shanidar 1 who were disabled and cared for by their communities has been very transformative for me. As a disabled kid, learning about those who came far, far before me and were cared for by their community was a very powerful thing. It made me know that my experiences of rejection and ostracization were not how humans have to be.

I personally feel a deep connection to history and feel that we can learn a lot from our past, even our relatives that are millions of years old. We can learn that so many things we experience today, like disability and parenthood, are not exclusive to us. While our modern circumstances fundamentally change how we experience these things, at our core we are still hominins doing hominin things.

The lives of anthropologists themselves are often neglected. I believe that we can’t just study others, we also have to study ourselves as anthropologists. Humans are emotional animals. We have to acknowledge and know that we have emotions about the subjects we work with.

Being completely unemotional about what we work with may be more common, but it isn’t universal and it doesn’t have to be and that’s something important to point out. There’s merits to both attachment and detachment and a mix of both, as my subjects talk about.