ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Speaking Ape: Biogeography, Language and the 19th Century Search for the Cradle of Man

• In Event: Histories of Biogeography Part 1

English Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the nascent science of human origins underwent a definite shift, moving from a humanistic framework dominated by theories of language, history, and culture to a biological framework built from deep time and Darwinian evolution. And yet, despite this significant intellectual transition, the practical geography of the “cradle of humanity” largely remained the same, with most researchers locating the evolutionary birthplace of humanity somewhere in Asia—with the notable exception of Charles Darwin, who preferred Africa instead. In this paper, I explore this shift in the evidentiary balance of power from the humanistic disciplines to the natural sciences in discourses on the origins of the human species, arguing that biogeography, with its emphasis on the interrelationship between organisms and their environment and on the global distribution of species helped form a conceptual and rhetorical bridge between these two seemingly separate domains. As a result, biogeography helped sustain the idea of an Asian “cradle of humanity” across a major scientific and evidentiary transition and provided a set of conceptual tools for researchers struggling to build a comprehensive evolutionary narrative from fragmented and temporally disjointed evidence.

Author

• Emily Kern, University of Chicago