Bones of Contention
by Roger Lewin
Summary
Paleoanthropology has produced two kinds of famous stories: the fossils, and the fights, and Lewin's book is the classic account of the fights. His thesis, argued through the field's great controversies, is that the science of human origins is the most subjective in existence, because the evidence is fragmentary, the stakes are ultimate, every researcher is also a member of the species under study, and interpretation therefore does almost all the work.
The case studies are the field's whole dramatic history. Raymond Dart and the Taung child, the small browed South African skull announced in 1925 as a human ancestor and dismissed for decades by an establishment that preferred its ancestors big brained and English. Piltdown Man, the establishment's reward: a forged skull planted in a Sussex gravel pit that fooled British science for forty years precisely because it confirmed what everyone wished to believe. The Neanderthal's century of image problems. And the modern era's blood feuds, Johanson against the Leakeys over Lucy and the family tree, fights over naming rights, dating, and who holds the fossils, conducted at conferences and in the press with a bitterness Lewin, who knew all the combatants, documents at close range.
The book's lasting usefulness is the pattern: each generation's consensus about human origins has tracked each generation's assumptions about humanity, with the bones themselves patient and mostly silent underneath.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the human story of the human origins business, science shown with its emotions attached.
Historical Context & Significance
Bones of Contention won the Science Book Prize in 1989, its second year, and marked the award finding its real subject: not science summarised but science examined, the practice with the practitioners left in.
Roger Lewin was ideally placed to write it, a former News editor at Science who had also co written, with Richard Leakey, the popular accounts of the Leakey fossils, meaning he had worked inside the very publicity machinery the book dissects; the anthropology journals reviewed it seriously, which for a popular book about their own quarrels was itself a verdict.
Its argument became the standard frame for the field's public history, taught in courses on science studies as a case book of theory laden observation, and a second edition in 1997 kept pace because the pattern kept obliging: the disputes over nearly every major find since, from the hobbit of Flores onward, have run on lines a reader of this book recognises immediately.