which has been helping me with the aforementioned project of stripping away some of the human obsessions and seeing us for the hominid/primate animal that we are. Tattersall, in fact, makes the point that the theoretical framework of the field of paleoanthropology (finding and interpreting hominid fossils) has been seriously skewed by a persistent insistence on seeing ourselves as the crowning glory of all creation (he calls it human exceptionalism), such that all hominid fossils lead to us, when in fact the fossil record may indicate a more complex family tree, in which we had cousins and distant hominid relatives. Who might be around now but we pretty much ate them. Okay, out-competed them, part of which might have involved eating them. That explains a lot about us, about how we're so damn afraid of ourselves, and have a passion for depictions of hominid on hominid violence. If you're a geek like me, Ian Tattersall's books, of which there are many, are a great read. Especially after feminist quantum physics. You'll not think about being human the same again.
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