Fossil Men, Indeed (A Book Review?)

Chapter 1. The Outsider-Insider

Look. I never met Tim White. I never worked in Ethiopia; I never visited Berkeley; we never crossed paths in Nairobi; he never visited Penn State while I was there; as far as I know, we only attended the same conference once, back when I was a graduate student. Though I saw him give a talk, I never spoke to him. The opportunity never arose. I was not the kind of student who asked my advisor to introduce me around at conferences. And, at least with me, Alan Walker was not the kind of advisor to introduce his student around at conferences. Much later, I was set to be in the same episode of the PBS/HHMI documentary Your Inner Fish as White et al. But, for mysterious and disappointing reasons, I was cut out of it along with the other young woman paleoanthropologist, Tracy Kivell.

Anyway, what I wanted to get across from the get-go is that while I’m more of an insider than many other readers, I’m also not really an insider.

The book is masterfully written. Kermit Pattison: Wow, just wow. That I listened to Moby-Dick over the same days that I read Fossil Men is testament to just how good Pattison’s writing is. Melville is a magnificent writer, just extraordinary, and other writers hope their books are read as far away from his as possible. Pattison held his own.

Of course, my interest in hominin fossils, my career in the field (fieldwork and beyond), and my experience with Moby-Dick elevated my experience of Fossil Men, so I have no way of seeing the book, plainly for what it is. Fossil Men became something of myself. 

Chapter 2. Thar, It Blows

Fossil Men was published in 2021. I first encountered the sizable tome in person, never even having heard about it.  My family and I were on our masked way to Zion National Park in the summer of ’21, stretching our legs between flights at O’Hare. I picked it up off the bookstore pile, flipped to the index, and looked for Alan Walker’s name. He was the fossil man I knew best.

Walker, Alan, 355

For perspective, “Romans, ancient” has four pages. “Nazism” has three.

I flipped to the jacket and surmised that this book is only about certain fossil men, some American, some Ethiopian, and a few Europeans, but most of all Tim White. I couldn’t help but wonder, then, what kind of book about Tim White this would be. So, I flipped back to the index to find Leslea Hlusko.

               Hlusko, Leslea, 5, 356

Alright, so, this was going to be a book about a man, framed in such a way as to effectively omit his marriage partner who is a significant member of his same scientific field. Okay. And wow… okay, wow… flipping through the index some more to find, or not find out that Carol Ward, Kay Behrensmeyer, and Kaye Reed are on as many pages as there are fossil primate caudal vertebrae on Rusinga Island. Telling.

This was mid 2021. I was still getting over my first read of the icky parts of Descent of Man and having to write publicly about some of those icky parts. In this moment, the public is full of defensive Darwin fans, including some who quite like those icky parts. That experience was, and continues to be, …. something. And then, I was still getting over an academic year of “teaching” to a screen of black squares. And I was recovering from Trump’s first term and all the hate and violence in it, fueled by beliefs that may as well have been ripped from the pages of Descent of Man. And then there was this whole pandemic going on as well. I wasn’t the only person who was running on stress and rage. And I definitely wasn’t interested in whatever Fossil Men seemed to be.

It didn’t help that I had just watched Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno and was shocked by how White behaved in the field with his crew. Entertaining and talented as he may be, to someone with many seasons of paleoanthropological fieldwork under her belt this was not the personality of someone I’d want to spend weeks in the wild with. This was too much.

Oh, maybe I shouldn’t throw stones. I’m energetic, too. I’m not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. But this was too much! Maybe he was merely charming the documentary crew that day. But it was so natural that it just couldn’t be what comes out for show. That’s got to cause some problems. So, then what’s the secret to his success? For whatever reason, I didn’t begin reading this book in the airport to find out. I simply put it down and walked away. Then, I totally forgot about its existence.

It’s hard to convey how strange it is for someone, especially someone like me, to not read a book about their own field. But there’s something that may help it make sense. Back when I struggled to get a tenure-track job after defending my dissertation, I thought that being dead would be better than not being a paleoanthropologist. Back then, the thought of death brought comfort. I did get a job, but I didn’t last very long as a paleoanthropologist. It’s been 20 years and I absolutely love my life, what I do with my hands and the rest of me, and what I think about with my mind.  I do not want to be a paleoanthropologist anymore, and have not for a while. But that me who wanted so badly to be a paleoanthropologist will always be part of who I am. And, I guess, that me is an asshole who doesn’t want to read about the people who are living the dream.

Combine that with the present me, a wise middle-aged woman, and, well, there’s at least two kinds of asshole in me right now.

Chapter 3. Aloha

If you want to know about the different kinds of assholes in Fossil Men, going to the index won’t help. At least, not if you’re searching for “asshole”.  For “a brief primer on the taxonomy of assholes”, I marked the page (107).

In the Tim White classification, the word carried many shades of meaning. A snarl of Asshole! Might condemn an enemy as morally or scientifically bankrupt. Down a notch, he sometimes used it to vent irritation that evaporated as quick as sweat in the desert. But You asshole could express sardonic affection, even grudging admiration. In moments like this, White adored that asshole.

Chapter 4. The Title

If you want to know how, after my initial meeting with Fossil Men, I found myself reading it, well Anne (of this very blog!) passed it along to me (with a truckload of books!) about a month ago.

I started with the three chapters, between the middle and end, that included one brief quote from Alan about Ardi: “This find is far more important than Lucy.” And then, having enjoyed those chapters, I decided to go for it and started the whole thing from the beginning. This is when I hoped I’d find out, from the author, what he meant by Fossil Men. What can I say. I’m a sensitive asshole. So when I saw him describe Ardi as,

an inconvenient woman who disturbed scholars of human origins more than many care to admit

my eyes rolled right out of my head. That was page 1. A woman. Who disturbs men. But they can’t admit it too much. Lest they express feelings like a girl. Fossil Men, indeed! But will he actually go there? Whoomp. There it is. A paragraph on page 9.

The title Fossil Men—which may seem an odd choice for a saga about a female skeleton—…

My eyes are rolling again, because that’s not why it seems like an odd choice to me! (Fun fact: Ardi could be male, we do not actually know the truth about that.)

…refers to these central characters, the lead investigators of a team that collected truckloads of old bones and occupied a lonely branch of the science that some peers disdained as outdated.

Hm. Peers disdained the Ardi teams science as “outdated”? That’s not what I expected to lead this story. Outdated science? Hm. Yeah, not the lead I was expecting.

The great irony is that this team proved more forward-thinking than many contemporaries,

Oh. I guess there’s a nice literary ring to putting things that way. Besides, this is America. Someone’s got to be the underdog who ends up the hero.

and fossils never go obsolete—and sometimes force us to write     history anew.

Fossils don’t force us to do anything. Our imaginations create the conditions in which we’ve written so many guesses and unknowable bullshit as natural history, going beyond the stone cold chronological facts, that when new fossils don’t fit the story we made up, then we have to revise the guesses and unknowable bullshit to make the new fossils fit in.

And, now, the end of the paragraph:

Once upon a time, “fossil men” was also a term for human ancestors, but the title should not be read as endorsement of bygone sexist language…

Hm. Like “an inconvenient woman” who caused all these dudes to fight? There I go again. Just being an asshole. It’s a trope as old as time. Why wouldn’t a writer use it?

… nor a dismissal of the contributions of female scientists on the Ardi team or any other. If anything, this field needs more women.

Does it? Is there a place for women out in the badlands where men roam with loaded machine guns? Is there a place for women where men think of themselves as bullshit detectors while they spew bullshit stories about hominins exchanging food for sex with bipedally incompetent females? Such a story has achieved such mythological status that it is perpetuated unquestioned in at least one best-selling 2025 biological anthropology textbook. We’re about 45 years into this story! It stuck, impervious to critiques. And that’s just one example of the bullshit. Is there a place for women in a violent and bullshit-ridden field? Maybe women are no longer excluded as much as they simply don’t want to find a place in whatever we’re calling “science”.  

We don’t know why the author of Fossil Men believes there aren’t enough women in the field and that the field needs more of them, because the issue never comes up again. Maybe it’s as simple as statistical parity. But maybe he’s alluding to the value of diverse viewpoints and how they calibrate the field’s shared bullshit detector.

When I read this paragraph about the title (before reading the rest of the book to come), I thought: maybe he will walk the talk. If he thinks there should be more women in the field, then maybe women’s ideas are featured in the book, you know, because of equity or because they’re valuable, like he suggests. I found myself daring this book not to dismiss the contributions of female scientists. Don’t do it. Don’t dismiss the contributions of women in paleoanthropology! Given the absence of just those three big contributors I had already searched for in the index (out of a small number of successful women in the field to begin with) I lowered my expectations and started a log, recording each instance a woman appeared. Can Fossil Men come through? Of course it can. But will it?

Chapter 5. “If you want to find something that walked like [Ardi] did, you might try the bar in Star Wars.”

First of all, it’s a cantina.

Second of all, the Star Wars stuff is what we had to listen to while we waited. This isn’t normal. When we have fossils, we might talk about them with colleagues, even those we’re not collaborating with, but we generally don’t talk much about them publicly until we are close to publication (or ready to share them) and when we do we don’t flaunt and taunt. We were hearing about Ardi’s sci-fi locomotion several years before we could read anything about the bones in a scientific paper.

Tim White had to know he was dangling a fat lamb over a den of hungry wolves. Maybe the delay was even a surprise to him. As you’ll learn in the book, there was more than science delaying the publication. Ethiopian politics played a major role, too. But, between discovery and publication, those 15 years, people on the Ardi team were applying their transformational knowledge and strong opinions about Ardi to their assessment of colleagues’ work, despite their colleagues’ not having any knowledge of Ardi during all that time. It was all pretty fucked up, and anyone should be able to see how that would cause tension between paleoanthropologists. More than tension. Ill will. It’s in the book. Also, it was palpable even for people not directly involved, at the time, like me. And I know how that (dare I say) animosity spilled out beyond the science around Ardi and over into the genus Homo.

It’s nothing but trouble when you are the only subset of people to know something profoundly important about what it is that an entire group of people studies. Everyone else is going on with the science, not knowing what you know. It’s not like they can freeze all their research until you publish your new fossils. That is why the information needs to be shared in a timely way. And this is why it looks like you don’t respect or empathize with others in your own field, regardless of whether that’s the case. (Note: From what I gather in the book, that may be the case.) How a thing functions is what a thing is.

In science, it’s too hard—especially for assholes who like to lord over so-called enemies whom they call (complete with scare quotes) “the profession”—to pretend like you don’t know what you know. It should feel unethical to pretend like that for too long. In that situation, the ethical move isn’t to stop pretending like you can unsee what you’ve seen and just be a giant asshole to everyone who hasn’t yet seen what you’ve seen. No, the ethical move for someone who wants to live the truth among others is to share that truth with others. If you don’t want to share until you’re good and ready, or if you can’t share because of government policy and politics, or whatever it is, then shut the fuck up until you can. Not saying it’s easy. Not at all. But jeeeeeeezus, just reading about these people is exhausting. I’m sure it’s more exhausting to be these people. Glad I’m not. Is that the point of the book? Glad I’m not a whaler, either. Whew.

Chapter 6. Tim White (sensu Werner Herzog) Is a Volcano (sensu Werner Herzog)

I watched Into the Inferno again, just after reading Fossil Men. White clearly loves this shit and I love him for it. I love this shit too. What’s not to like about Herzog’s Tim White?  What an asshole I am when I’m unhappy. Four years between the first viewing and now, and I have an entirely different reaction to White’s personality. How fascinating. Anway. Phew! I’m sure the book helped. My book is marked to high hell with reactions to quotes and ideas, many of them positive remarks about White’s. Now all the adoration (even through his prickly eruptions) makes sense. And it makes more sense that he could be so successful in spite of all the opposite of what’s in this film (which is peppered through the book).

Chapter 7. The White Paper

The words “bite me” come to mind. It’s something a friend in a lab down the hall at Penn State liked to say. Perhaps that’s what she said way back then when we read “A view on the science: Physical anthropology at the millennium” (2000). “the White Paper”. “Bite me” is one of many correct reactions to this paper which you can read all about on page 257. Who writes a paper saying that there are no more fossil sites only to be out there, in that moment, finding them?  I read it again, a few  years ago, can’t remember why but it was with some students. Here’s another appropriate response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7iQtP4cO1o 

Fossils are rare but deep-time-dirt remains plentiful and productive. The only explanation for that paper, thanks to insights from this book, is that White believes everyone else is incompetent and so he hoped he could keep us from doing what we love.  If that’s not a fair evaluation, does it matter? The function of a thing is the thing.

Chapter 8. The Profanity

Over the days I read Fossil Men, I found myself swearing more than normal. It’s got so much on the pages. The energy could have been part of it, too. I said “fuck you dog” to my dog! She can be a horrible person, but I’ve never said that to her before. I felt awful. And then I said “fuck you [person’s name]” as I read an email from [person’s name] that irritated me. I felt less awful, but still… somewhat bad. I love swearing but this new level of it was toxic. After getting to about the halfway point, I got better. So did the book. 

Chapter 9. Hyperhidrosis

Why didn’t I ask Alan Walker to introduce me around at conferences? If you really must know… after growing up and into having chronically sweaty hands throughout my teenage years, I was a squirrel wherever there was hand-shaking to be done. It’s not as big a problem anymore, and it helps to be out of Florida, but it’s not gone away entirely either. Just writing about it now made my hands sweat. Just imagining an upcoming handshake makes my palms tingle and moisten, if they’re not moist already. Watching rock climbing is the sure-est fastest trigger. Alcohol helps keep hyperhidrosis at bay. I offered a fist bump at a conference long long ago. Surely No one wants me to shove this into theirs. But I got shamed for it. It’s a motherfucker! I thought covid would end hand-shaking forever. I was just as excited for that as for the guaranteed, forever four-day workweek and the inevitable, anti-racist, patriarchy-smashing makeover of the police.

Chapter 10. How To Kill a Human Evolutionary Fairytale

How surreal to see Lovejoy’s fairytales about Ardi presented almost entirely without critique in Fossil Men, but not surprising!  I think the only objection that the author includes is the fact that some women call it a “male fantasy”. Why more men don’t call it the same beats me. Maybe they don’t know how pervasive it is. Maybe they’re not teaching the big survey courses with the textbooks that still include it. Or maybe they think it’s good science. It’s been 45 years of this, on top of Man the Hunter, etc. that we’re still dealing with today too.  

Not that I’ve killed many fairytales but I think that, at this point in my life, this asshole has accumulated enough wisdom to be unabashedly sure of what’s untrue in human evolutionary biology, and righteously so. That’s how, despite not yet having any kills of my own, I can I present this set of guidelines for killing human evolutionary stories:

1. The first rule of killing a human evolutionary fantasy/fairytale//myth/fiction/story is to never tell another human evolutionary story to take its place.

2. The second rule of killing a human evolutionary fantasy/fairytale//myth/fiction/story is to never tell another human evolutionary story to take its place.

You cannot play the game. Once you play the game then a story wins. It’s because there’s now a foil, which can only make one of the stories look better, in comparison. And because people believe that there must be a story, then one is chosen as the winner. Having any story is bad, first of all, but what’s worse is by playing the storytelling game, you’ve given legitimacy to stories. And, often, the first story wins because they got there first, it’s probably better than yours, and, because it can’t be falsified, it’s there forever. Or, if you win, yours is. Ew.

3. Fuck people’s fear of feeding the creationists! Evolution is true. There are the facts of evolution and then there are the unverifiable, unfalsifiable stories we tell with them. Doing creationism to own the creationists is not the move.

4. Look through the story you’re killing and point out any actual evidence, any actual facts. Separate these from the guesses/theories one could eventually verify and the guesses/theories that one can never verify (a.k.a. the bullshit).

5.  Offer alternative counter guesses/theories about the same facts in play ONLY to point out that these alternate narratives or scenarios are just as unfalsifiable and unverifiable! This is a tool for showing just how bullshitty the original fairytale is.

6.  If you haven’t done so already, point out that floating truth or even hypothetical/ plausible truth with no regard for its unknowability is floating bullshit in the academic, philosophical sense.

7. Acknowledge that just because storytelling has been legitimate in human evolutionary biology doesn’t mean that it should continue to be. We don’t have to put any of it in the textbooks as if it’s science.

8. Argue that what we can know about the past is enough and is important because it demonstrates, in relief, what bullshit we make of it. Fossils are liberating!

Chapter 11. Hypothesis/ Hypotheses

Hey paleoanthropologists and writers-about-paleoanthropology, you keep using that word.

Chapter 12. Women Talking

A comprehensive list of quotes by women in Fossil Men:

·       p. 5 – Meave Leakey, re: White’s science

·       p. 5 – Leslea Hlusko, re: White

·       P. 51 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 52 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 53 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 54 – Mary Leakey’s telegram with rules for White to follow in the field

·       p. 66 – Susan Antón, described only as “former student”, re: White, how she heard he was “God” (quite something to see her included like this when she was a god to us anthropology majors at U.F. and has been such an important member of the field, kind of like if the author of Van Halen’s biography Rock Men described Henry Rollins only as a “fan”)

·       p. 76 – Frehiwot, re: husband Berhane Asfaw

·       p. 83 – Frehiwot, talking to Asfaw

·       p. 142 – Ann Getty, “need a bandage”

·       p. 180 – Meave Leakey, re: science

·       p. 217 – Elisabeth Vrba, re: science

·       p. 219 – Raymonde Bonnefille, re: science and White

·       p. 221 – Sarah Feakins, re: science

·       p. 244 – Dean Falk, re: getting tent burgled at nearby site with another (positioned as rival) team

·       p. 290 – Bruce Latimer’s date, “I think you better take me home.”

The book goes until page 421. But, apparently, I didn’t see any more women talking after page 290. Maybe I missed someone. I cannot muster the fucks required to double-check.

Chapter 13. Castration

The violent removal of male genitalia comes up four times in Fossil Men (pages 14, 37, 110, and 124). However, no actual castrations occurred in this book.

Chapter 14. The Real Assholes of the Middle Awash

…are the gun and bullet manufacturers and the people who buy them and the people who give them out to other people. What a world. Men (and “zero fucking zero” women as far as I can tell) just roaming around the Ethiopian wilderness with machine guns as tools for dominance. Occasionally they shoot other men. The stupidest circumstances caused by the stupidest empires. How is this a chapter in Earth’s history? And why couldn’t we have been born after it was all over? So stupid.

It’s hard not to wonder how much of this stuff seeps into the dogmatic perpetuation of the Killer Ape/ Man the Hunter/ “Tribal” (fictional) narrative of human nature.

Chapter 15. Tiny Circles

When I was young and stupid I once said, “Well, I guess I’m lucky. My advisor doesn’t have any enemies.”

“HA!,” is how a senior member of the field responded to that.

I asked no follow-up questions because this was a past me who verbalized few questions, period, but mostly because I was shocked to hear Alan had enemies and, also, reddened for being so naive.

I was so close to being directly involved in the messes of Fossil Men than I knew before reading the book. It was an afternoon in spring semester, 1999. All afternoon I read Bill Kimbel’s papers (that I had photocopied from the journals in the library stacks) before he was scheduled to call me. Just days before I had been awarded an Institute of Human Origins fellowship, which would mean attending the Ph.D. program at ASU. I wanted to go there far more than to Penn State, but Penn State flew me in for a visit. ASU did not. I couldn’t say no after that, and I loved Alan. My letter of support from Jack Harris (then director of the Koobi Fora field school) basically said I was born for fieldwork, so no wonder I got these offers. Little did I know that Alan Walker had sworn off fieldwork. This was Alan Walker. I didn’t even think to ask him. I just assumed he was still doing fieldwork because that’s what he did. I moved to Penn State and then I found out. My brain, my heart, I should have spontaneously combusted right then. Somehow, instead, I continued to live as if unscathed. I was in it. No turning back now so there’s no point in getting upset. But just think. If I’d gone to ASU instead, its’ not like I’d automatically have been in the field, either! If you read the book, you’ll see how the late nineties were a motherfucker for Johanson and Kimbel. I’d have been gummed up in all that but without Alan Walker and all the rest of my lovely professors and friends and dear friends at Penn State. No regrets at all. I’m not even mad at Alan for taking on a kid built for fieldwork knowing he wasn’t going to take me anywhere. He loved this shit too. He probably wasn’t ready to admit it to himself that those days were behind him. After getting to know him, I still don’t think he ever did. I can’t be mad.  I’m not even trying not to. I’m not taking any of it personally. The eye-opening stories in the book helped me to not take it personally in all new ways, too.

I love fossils, especially of our closest relatives. But the passionate arguments over the unknowable? No thanks. The maneuvering for permits and access? No thanks. The guns? Absolutely no thanks. And I’m not talking entirely from some  high horse. I’m just not built for all that politicking and sphincter-squeezing, though, if I had male parts instead of female parts…maybe I’d be a contender.

Anyway, where I am fully up on a high horse is about the unknowable. Why can’t people find a way to study fossils without telling stories about where exactly they fit in the tree of relatedness to others and us? Why can’t people find a way to study fossils without telling stories about how the males and females treated one another 4 million years ago? What’s so awful about simply describing the conditions at a site at a time in the past?  Why isn’t what we can know, enough?

Chapter 16. Mentions

A comprehensive list of women scientists who appear in Fossil Men along with some acknowledgment that they have indeed made scientific contributions (but not necessarily what those contributions might be):

·       Mary Leakey

·       Meave Leakey

·       Louise Leakey

·       Mary Claire King

·       Alison Brooks (only mentioned in parentheses as wife of …)

·       Susan Larson (only mentioned in parentheses as co- of…)

·       Ruth “Dee” Simpson

·       Elisabeth Vrba

·       Raymonde Bonnefille and Doris Barboni

·       Sarah Feakins

·       Brigitte Senut

·       Linda Spurlock (and the brief mention includes “sexy lingerie”)

·       Cheryll Tickle (on heels of mention, a man down the hall’s science is lauded)

·       Melanie McCollum

Chapter 17. Obsession

Is it science or is it vengeance? Fossils are like Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is like whatever the fossils stand for. Are they to have as one’s own? To dominate? Do we ever know why Tim White or the other fossil men in this book is like how they are? Tim is like a martyr, almost: doing it because everyone else, as the sentiment goes, cannot. They’re incompetent. It’s like if he didn’t do this no one would be doing it right. No one could. I can’t help but think that’s true for the field work he does too. You need someone like him, whom you don’t exactly find on every street corner, to volunteer to go out into automatic-weapons-land over and over and over again. But he does love fossils, those “fucking jewels.” Maybe he loves them for the same reasons I do—because they are the tangible proof of deep, fantastic space-time and my, yours, and everyone’s infinite connectedness to everyone and everything in the universe. But that kind of gooey stuff doesn’t make it into Fossil Men. I’m a girl, so I’m allowed to share my gooey feelings in public. Not very volcanic of me, I suppose.

Chapter 18. Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails and Bullshit Stories Masquerading as Science

Oh, and if I were a boy, I could get away with the sex for food bullshit. You know how I know? Woman the Gatherer never took hold. Man the Hunter may not be our field’s explicit framework, but it is cultural common sense, along with this belief that we evolved to be “tribal”. That view of human nature—with masculine traits being the driver of our species’ evolution and our triumph over nature—stuck because it was already there before science, before theorizing about the unverifiable and unknowable past was deemed science. It stuck because it naturalizes patriarchy. Boys can tell stories and girls cannot.

Peoples’ reaction to that fun little quirk about human evolutionary biology has been to try to raise women’s voices, to empower them to tell stories too, to do exactly what the men have been doing. No thanks.

No scholars or scientists or journalists or science writers or teachers or professors should be telling stories with the storyless facts of human evolution. Sure, free speech, but believing that completely unverifiable stories are fact is only for the faithful.

Chapter 19. Anatomy

I don’t have a first author paper in Journal of Human evolution of American Journal of Physical Anthropology. I tried, a little. I submitted the hundred or so pages of fossil description that I thought needed to go somewhere, anywhere, other than my dissertation (Proconsul heseloni feet from Rusinga Island, Kenya) because I was made to believe that dissertations didn’t count and that I couldn’t publish my quantitative (metric and CT) analyses of those fossils without describing them first. To combine the two would take over a hundred journal pages! So, I sent that huge stack of pages of description (virtually, of course) to JHE.

Why Bill Kimbel would bother to read the whole thing and provide some comments when it was just going to be rejected for being too damn long and including no quantitative analysis is beyond me. His only comment that I put to memory was his exasperated reaction to my use of “gunwale” as an analogy for some aspect of some deformed bone. I think he wrote “really?” (Yes, really. I had assumed my analogies were kosher because they passed Alan’s careful readings.) A second (anonymous) reviewer shamed me for “aping” my advisor about taxonomy. (Who cares about made-up labels so much that they get nasty to people about it? Too many people and not enough me, I suppose. Otherwise, maybe I’d still be a paleoanthropologist?) He (I assume, because I’m an asshole) accused me of not reading one of my sources because I had misgendered its author. I read all my sources. But I never got to say so in a rebuttal that never was. How do you publish your analysis of fossils that have not yet been described in a non-dissertation publication? You don’t if you’re me. My dissertation research remains in my dissertation. You can read the abstract and all the rest of it here: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/7393 .

Fast forward a year or two and I am newly on the tenure track and submit a study I cooked up with Alan before I did my dissertation work. It was the topic of my first conference presentation back when I was a rookie grad student, some 7 years prior. They put me at the podium between Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk, so the room was packed (iykyk). Needless to say that imagining everyone in the audience was sitting and straining on a toilet did not calm my nerves enough. It was the public speaking, not the ideas. Not at all. Those, I thought, were safe. I suggested that the Chemeron temporal (KNM-BC 1) could belong to A. garhi.

It took me several years to realize it was worth publishing, or at least worth trying to. Why no one had suggested I do so during grad school is a mystery. It was a fun little study where I was able to predict temporomandibular joint measures from molar measures, which seemed like a reasonable functional relationship (the bigger the chewing surfaces, the bigger the joint handling what those chewing surfaces were doing), and use that to show that isolated hominin molars could be matched to isolated TMJ fossils. I emailed Alan from my new desk in my office at NEIU, but Alan would not be a co-author. (This was right around the time he was having me ghost edit for him, which I did for no benefit other than the satisfaction of helping him carry out his commitments past the point of his ability/willingness to, but wasn’t my work a commitment too? That question I never allowed myself to ask, not even rhetorically, until this very moment.) So, A. garhi’s teeth seemed to match with KNM-BC 1. I’d published on fossil hominins before, but this was the first time I’d done some measures and suggested that separate fossils may belong to the same species. I couldn’t believe how angry my paper made an anonymous editor at the journal. It was so utterly offensive to him. It’s probably no coincidence that it was right around that time that I started to write on The Mermaid’s Tale. Constantly. At the time, I was just starting up several summers of wonderful paleoanthropological expeditions to Rusinga Island, Kenya. But all that time, I was writing my way out of paleoanthropology, here on this blog with Ken and Anne.

Chapter 20. “The Profession”

A couple times in Fossil Men, readers are reminded that White (and maybe Lovejoy too) refer to colleagues in paleoanthropology (and maybe biological/physical anthropology in general) with a sarcastic “the profession”. Now’s as good a time as any to describe the difference between dicks, pussies, and assholes.

Pussies don’t like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes— assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much or fuck when it isn’t appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves… because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. (Team America: World Police, 2004– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32iCWzpDpKs )

Chapter 21. The Whiteness of the Field

Paleoanthropology is white. It’s less white than it used to be. As described in the book, Tim White’s efforts to include Ethiopian scientists are a reason why. It’s an important story, the whiteness of paleoanthropology, because it helps make sense of the narratives we still use for human evolution and human origins. The “exodus” from Africa. The frame that only the more evolved sapiens could “finally” escape the confines of that (insinuated) awful place and continue evolving (towards superiority) elsewhere. Science is a baby and it was born into a world with race/ism. We may be only a few generations on from there, science-wise and race-wise, and we may talk differently but our narratives have been slow to transform away from white supremacist and colonial (and capitalist, patriarchal, sexist, biological determinist, essentialist, adaptationist, teleological, storified, etc.) assumptions. I wish the narratives of human evolution and, by extension, human nature would change faster.

Chapter 22. Mankind’s Dominion

Contrary to what many people think about paleoanthropology and human evolutionary biology writ-large, the stakes are fucking high. Stories matter. We like to pass the buck and believe that medical science is where the stakes are actually high, but guess what narratives control how medical science is carried out? OURS. And right now, so many of ours (or that come out of ours) are mad-libbed versions of (how white, patriarchal people read) Genesis, and whatever you want to call the genre that includes the food-for-sex, helpless female: monogamy core?

Fossil Men, indeed.

The fossils inspire tall tales. But fossils are the cold hard facts that demonstrate just how tall those tales are.

How could holding fossils in your hands do anything but reveal the unknowable truths about our natural history? Are they ancestors or descendents to X or Y species? We cannot know. Did they share food in pair-bonds because it was too hard for females to feed themselves? We cannot know. Etc. Etc. The fossils themselves are the only truth there is.

Evolution is true but, also, live in the mystery, motherfuckers. It’s magnificent! Besides, to do otherwise is to breech the bounds of science.

Chapter 135. The Lone, Mysterious Figure

Thar she sits! Page 208. The one woman in a photograph in Fossil Men. Cross-legged on the dirt, leaning against a cooler, in the background, blurry beyond recognition, and looking intentionally so, as if blurred in Photoshop so that Tim White pops.

Epilogue. Death or Life

Do you want to not-die or do you want to live?

This isn’t one of those “there’s two kinds of people” observations. But it’s close. When people have extreme personalities on the not-die side, a disturbing imbalance surfaces. It seems like there are more people who want to not-die than who want to live. Society seems to be far more affected, and controlled by, the not-diers.

When we want to not-die, we cower in fear or we confront our mortality. Life becomes trying to not-die. And that means facing death, imagined or real, as life. And trying to not-die again and again. To win this time, to triumph over mortality until we cannot any longer, to the point that not trying to not-die is the same as dying. Not challenging death amounts to death. So really, these repeating attempts to face mortality are about denying our mortality. That’s living in fear. And that breeds anger. The Pequod is full of men who have to hunt and kill whales to not kill themselves. The captain and his mates have secure benefactors, pack enough rations, and hire sufficient brains and brawn to arrange a showdown with mortality in order to not-die, as a way of life.

What if, instead, we accept our mortality. Not facing death but embracing death. A book about such a life would never be titled Fossil Men. Whether it’s because of male dominance and violence or because (people deemed) not-man-enough are excluded from participating in arranged face-offs with death or because the not-man-enough opt out of the not-die life, then the not-man-enough can live differently. And they do. They show us that we don’t need to challenge death so intentionally, so angrily. Instead, we live with death every day. Death is just life. And when mortality is something we live with, not against, then we can’t help but live for love. When you live in the reality of death, what else is life for but love? The only rational response to our precious, mysterious reality is to love.

That includes loving what cannot be fully understood or known. Maybe even because it cannot be fully understood or known. Like other people. And, like paleoanthropologists, who provide constant proof, in front of our very eyes, that what terrible things we do to each other and to the planet is not the natural order or our evolved destiny. That’s entirely made up, imaginary, bullshit that we tell ourselves. We could live other stories, instead. To invoke novelist Ruth Ozeki, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312488/a-tale-for-the-time-being-by-ruth-ozeki/ I’d rather know the truth about our past, the whole truth about human evolution, but not knowing (because we cannot!) keeps all the possibilities, all the world, alive.

And that’s why, despite the humanity of the Pequod’s crew, we root for the whale. And that’s why, despite the assholes who find them and the dicks who spew bullshit about them and the pussies who (rightfully) complain about it all, we root for the fossils.

Source: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2025/06/fossil-men-indeed-book-review.html