Review of: Shaping
Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins
Author: John Gurche
Publisher: Yale University Press
Source: Library
Grade: A
I’m with Alice (the girl of Wonderland fame) who wondered
what the use was of books without pictures. Or conversations. And paleoartist John Gurche provides plenty of both in his magnificent coffee table-sized book of
anthropological art, Shaping Humanity:
How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins.
Gurche’s sculptures and paintings of humankind’s ancestral
species (hominins) are on view in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Human Origins, as well as the pages of National
Geographic and other publications and television specials. In Shaping
Humanity, he walks readers through his process in creating the sculptures
for the Smithsonian, starting with skull and skeleton casts through the making
of their eyeballs.
Yes, he makes his own eyeballs, explaining “I used to
purchase artificial eyes, and when I would sometimes ask for a size outside the
range common in living humans the response on the other end of the phone would
first be silence, and then, in a somewhat suspicious tone, the question ‘Who is
this eye for’?
“The eyes, more than any other area, must carry the illusion
of life, or the sculpture will be dead, a silicone and acrylic anatomical model
with no life or magic,” he writes. "There must be a sentience in the eyes, a
feeling that there is someone in there.”
And although casting the acrylic eyes is a time-consuming
project, full of room for mistakes, the results are worth the effort. Any defective
eyes, he notes, make great Halloween decorations!
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| Neadertal: wikipedia |
A regular at fossil excavations, with extensive dissection
experience, Gurche uses the most current scientific available for his
reproductions. But science can only go so far, leaving the artist to make
judgments about details such as skin color, hair covering, even ear lobe
placement, for which no fossil information is available.
And then, of course, there are toes, those small bones that
are apt to get lost over the millennia that passed between the death of the
hominin and the time its remains are discovered by modern humans.
Exactly what did the toes of Homo erectus, for example, the first hominin species known to have
left the ancestral African homeland, look like? Following the scientific
literature, Gurche made a best guess during the creation of his bronze statue of
a female Homo erectus for the
Smithsonian.
Lacking direct evidence, he used examples from what was
believed to be a related species to construct feet with the big toes slightly
shorter than the rest, only to have new research upset that model. The statue’s
toes got chiseled to make way for a thoroughly modern-looking foot for a more
than one million-year-old woman.
Gurche leads readers through both science and art in his
reconstruction of nearly a dozen human ancestral and related species. And
although the language of Shaping Humanity
is among the most accessible I have found in books on human evolution aimed at
lay readers, he includes a helpful glossary, as well as extensive bibliography
for those interested in further research. In all, it’s a book both gorgeous and
thought-provoking.
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