berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Alterity and Human Evolution: Deep-Time Perspectives on Difference and Variation
Martin Porr and Oscar Moro Abadía

Part I: Alterity and the (Biological) Species Concept

Chapter 1. Science and the Sacred
Jonathan Marks

Chapter 2. The “Other” Homo Erectus: Individuals, Identity, and Inference in the Human Fossil Record
Susan C. Antón

Chapter 3. Species as Alterity: Moving Beyond Species in Paleoanthropology
Sang-Hee Lee and Cathy Willermet

Chapter 4. Like Us/Not Like Us: Critical Theory, Anthropology, and the Neanderthal Dilemma
Brian Boyd

Chapter 5. Alternative Evolutionary Pathways of Emotional Responses in Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH), and the Co-evolution of Neurobiology and Culture
Penny Spikins

Part II: Alterity, History, and Reflexivity

Chapter 6. Narratives of “Other” in the Emergence of the Genus Homo
Lauren Schroeder, Yonatan Sahle, Sheela Athreya, and Rebecca Rogers Ackermann

Chapter 7. Neanderthals and the Issue of Masculinity: The Role of Gender in Popular Neanderthal Discourse
Susan Peeters and Hub Zwart

Chapter 8. The Hero of Human Evolution: Deconstructing Illustrations of Human Evolution and Considering the Place of Children
Michelle C. Langley

Chapter 9. Normal Is Not What You Think It Is! Challenging the Ascription of Contemporary Normativity to Patterns and Processes in Human Evolution
Agustin Fuentes

Chapter 10. Interpreting Variability, Diversity, and Alterity in the Hominin Fossil Record
Mathilde Lequin

Part III: Against Alterity: Critical Intervention

Chapter 11. Alterity Is a Violent Western Construct: In Indigenous Worldviews, We Are All Related
Paulette Steeves

Part IV: Alterity as an Ontological and Epistomological Challenge

Chapter 12. A Critical Ontology of the Archaeology of Human Origins
Benjamin Alberti

Chapter 13. Thinking about “Radical” Alterity: Why Did Animal Image-Making Disappear in Paleolithic Europe?
Oscar Moro Abadía, Margaret W. Conkey, Manuel R. González Morales, Bryn Tapper, Eduardo Palacio Pérez, and Amy Chase

Chapter 14. Paleolithic Art as a Dynamic Symbolic System: From Worldviews to Image-Making
Carole Fritz

Chapter 15. The Alterity of Deep History and the Hospitality of Things
Clive Gamble

Chapter 16. Alterity Evolving: Evolution, Cognition, and Social Ontology
Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus

Chapter 17. Multispecies Alterity: Interrogating Hominin, Animal and Techno-material Diversities of the Deep Past
Shumon Tobias Hussain

Index

Alterity and Human Evolution

Deep-Time and Multispecies Perspectives on Difference and Variation

Edited by Oscar Moro Abadía and Martin Porr

406 pages, 32 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-464-4 Hb Published (April 2026)

eISBN 978-1-83695-465-1
web ISBN 978-1-83695-465-1

Details

“I am quite simply stunned by this book… I feel certain that this book will become a landmark volume .” • Andrew M. Jones, Professor of Archaeology, Stockholm University

Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, this book contributes to current debates on human evolution. In a political climate marked by movements such as Black Lives Matter and policies like Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 against ‘gender ideology’, this volume brings together a group of leading scholars in archeology, paleoanthropology and human evolution to examine how narratives of human origins intersect with issues of race, gender, and anthropocentrism. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.

Oscar Moro Abadía is Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Some of his recent publications include Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century (with Margaret Conkey and Josephine McDonald; Springer, 2024) and Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches and Indigenous Knowledges (with Martin Porr; Routledge, 2021).

Martin Porr is Associate Professor and Future Fellow at School of Social Sciences, Archaeology, The University of Western Australia. Some of his recent publications include One World Anthropology and Beyond. A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold (with Niels Weidtmann; Routledge, 2024) and Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches, and Indigenous Knowledges (with O. Moro Abadía; Routledge, 2021).

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology Archaeology

Area:

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC003000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Archaeology; SOC002020 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Physical