Course Syllabus

     origins of human society

Class Day/Time/Location: Tues/Thurs 2:40-3:55 pm

Instructor: Severin Fowles (sfowles@barnard.edu)

Office Hours: Wednesdays from 10-12 noon and by appointment

Time—the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open. They love to gaze into our faces and hearken to our discourse. It's because the very first men and women were lizards. If you don't believe me, go grab one by the tail and see it come right off.

— Charles Simic (Untitled)

Origin stories—every society has its account of how the human drama has unfolded. Origin stories address fundamental ontological questions, grounding identities and defining our relationships with others. Origin stories tell us who we are.

Over the past century and a half, biologists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and others in the scientific community have pieced together a powerful new account of the human past within an evolutionary paradigm. Like its predecessors, the evolutionary account is an origin story, but it is distinguished by the degree to which it has emerged through an engagement with certain existing material records: fossil, archaeological, and genetic. Using these records, scientists are altering our understanding of what it means to be human with stunning velocity.

In this course we explore the development of humans and human society from the first bipedal steps of our hominin ancestors, to the emergence of new forms of sexuality, to the earliest image production during the Pleistocene, and on to the establishment of early agricultural villages. Roughly six million years of prehistory are reviewed with emphases on those heightened periods of change that have tended to be described as “revolutions.”  Participants will become familiar with the fossil and/or archaeological records of those revolutions, the competing theories regarding why they occurred, and the political stakes involved in human origins research, all the while staying close to the deeper question of how evolutionary narratives anchor understanding of who we are today. 

teaching fellows:     

Four teaching fellows will serve as your guides this term. In week 3, you will be assigned a particular fellow, but you will work with all three over the course of the term.

• Margaux Fitoussin <margaux.fitoussi@columbia.edu>
• Alexandria Mitchem <atm2161@columbia.edu>
• Akshay Ragupathy <ar3786@columbia.edu>
• Joel Van De Sande < jv2675@columbia.edu>

sections:  

Sections will commence week 3 and convene periodically week throughout the term. They are a venue in which you will discuss course material in a more intimate setting as well as gain hands-on experience with archaeological and paleoanthropological objects.

films:     

Four films will be screened during the semester. Attendance at the screenings (or arranged private viewings) is required.

• Project Nim (2011, James Marsh, dir.)
• Jane (2017, Brett Morgen, dir.)
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011, Werner Herzog, dir.)
• Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio, dir.)

method of evalution:   

Grades will be based on…

• a take-home midterm exam (30%)
• an in-class final exam  (30%)
• an essay in response to Project Nim (2011, James Marsh, dir.) and Jane (2017, Brett Morgen, dir.) (1000-2000 words) (10%)
• an essay in response to Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011, Werner Herzog, dir.) and George Bataille’s “The passage from animal to man and the birth of art” (1000-2000 words) (10%)
• an essay in response to Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio, dir.), Ian Hodder's Where Are We Heading?, and our wider discussions over the course of the term (2500-3500 words) (20%) 

dangerous optional exercises:  

Two optional exercises supplement the course…

• Flint-knapping (or “An Exercise in Paleolithic Humility”): Here’s your opportunity to bleed for your education. The flint-knapping exercise will take place on campus during the first half of the term. Students will have the opportunity to use Paleolithic tools to hammer away at chert cores in an effort to create a simple biface. This is an optional exercise in humility, designed to build respect for the technological accomplishments of our hominin ancestors. (Band-aids included.)
• Atlatl-throwing (or “How to Starve in the Pleistocene”): During the second half of the term, students will again have the opportunity to humble themselves before their hominin ancestors by attempting to use Paleolithic-style spear throwers in a competition for distance and accuracy.

readings:  

All texts for the course are downloadable as PDF files through Courseworks. Five of our more substantial texts will also be available for purchase at Book Culture, and while I do not require that you purchase them, especially if money is very tight, all are well worth owning as actual books. (Moreover, you should give your eyes a break from the computer screen every now and then.)

• Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. 1994. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
• Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Harvard.
• Hodder, Ian. 2018. Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things. Yale.
• Lewis-Williams, David. 2004. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Thames & Hudson.

learning objectives:  

This course introduces students to the fossil, archaeological, genetic, and environmental evidence mobilized by anthropologists to construct models of biological and social evolution in the human past. Through readings and hands-on projects, students will gain a critical understanding of the relevant empirical data: the morphological characteristics of hominid fossils through time, the genetic relationships used to model the hominid family tree, the artifacts and archaeological sites, and the morphological changes in plant and animal species over the course of domestication. Students will become familiar with the major debates in the study of human evolution from bipedalism to the Neolithic Revolution and will learn to critically evaluate competing hypotheses on both empirical and ethical grounds.