A number of Enlightenment thinkers, including influential German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, defined humanity without really having much of an idea how most of humanity lived or what it looked like. Those who lived in other lands, including the indigenous people of the New World and Australia, were often a mystery to them. ‘A universal understanding of human origins was actually created at the time by white men in Europe who only had indirect access to information about other people in the world through the lens of colonialism,’ explains Porr. So when they went out into the real world and encountered people who didn’t look like them, who lived in ways they didn’t choose to live, the first question they were forced to ask themselves was: Are they the same as us?
‘If you define humanity in some universal sense, then it’s very restrictive. And in the eighteenth century, that was totally Eurocentric. And of course, when you define it in that sense, then of course, so to speak, other people do not meet these standards,’ Porr continues. Because of the narrow way Europeans had set their parameters of what constituted a human being, placing themselves as the paradigm, people of other cultures were almost guaranteed not to fit. They didn’t necessarily share the same aesthetics, political systems or moral values, let alone food or habits. In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.
And here lay the fatal error at the birth of modern science, one that would persist for centuries, and arguably persists to this day. It is a science of human origins, as British anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, that ‘has written the essence of humanity in its own image, and that measures other people by how far they have come in living up to it’.
‘When you look at these giants of the eighteenth century, Kant and Hegel, they were terribly racist. They were unbelievably racist!’ says Porr. Kant stated in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764, ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’ When he met a quick-witted carpenter, the man was quickly dismissed with the observation that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.’ While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many, including French philosopher Voltaire and Scottish philosopher David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites.
By the nineteenth century, those who didn’t live like Europeans were thought to have not yet fully realised their potential as human beings. Even now, notes Porr, when scientists discuss human origins, he still catches them describing Homo sapiens in what sound like nineteenth-century European economic terms, as being ‘better’ and ‘faster’ than other human species. There’s an implicit assumption that higher productivity and more mastery over nature, the presence of settlements and cities, are the marks of human progress, even of evolution. The more we are superior to nature, the more we are superior as humans. It is a way of thinking that forces a ranking of people from closer to nature to more distant, from less developed to more, from worse to better. And history shows us that it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements are due to their innate capacities.
What Europeans saw as shortcomings in other populations in the early nineteenth century quickly became conflated with how they looked. Cultural scholars Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin explain how, in that century, race came to be everything. One writer at the time noted that the natives of Australia differ ‘from any other race of men in features, complexion, habits and language’. Their darker skin and different facial features became markers of their separateness, a sign of their permanent difference. Their perceived failure to cultivate the land, to domesticate animals and live in houses was taken as part and parcel of their appearance. And this had wider implications. Race, rather than history, could then be framed as the explanation for not only the Aboriginals’ failure, but the failure of all non-white races to live up to the European ideal that Europeans had themselves defined. An Aboriginal Australian – just by having darker skin – could now be lumped together with a West African, for instance, despite being continents apart, with entirely different cultures and histories. Both were black, and this was all that mattered.
Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity. It was an ideal that went so far as to become enshrined in Australian law. ‘When Australia federated in 1901, when the states came together as a nation, one of the first pieces of legislation to pass through Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the basis of the White Australia policy. It sought to fuse the new nation together with whiteness by excluding non-European migration and attempting to assimilate and, ultimately, to eliminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity,’ explains Billy Griffiths. What happened to Gail Beck’s family was one result of these attempts to remove the colour from Australia, in her case to drain it out of her mother’s line over generations. ‘There was this horrible language of “breeding out the colour” from full-bloods to half-castes to quarter-castes to octoroons,’ Griffiths adds. The goal was to steadily replace one ‘race’ with another.
By the time this state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing was taking place, a crisis had already emerged within scientific circles. Since the Enlightenment, many European thinkers had united around the idea that humankind was one, that we all shared the same common capacities, the same spark of humanity that made it possible for even those of us condemned as ‘miserable’ to improve, with enough encouragement. Even if there was a racial hierarchy, even if there were lesser humans and greater ones, we were all still human. But in the nineteenth century, as Europeans encountered more people in other parts of the world, as they began to see the variety that exists across our species, and failed to ‘improve’ people the way they wanted to, some began to seriously doubt this cherished belief.
The passage of the nineteenth century saw some make an intellectual shift away from the original Enlightenment view of a single humanity with shared origins. Scientists ventured to wonder whether we all really did belong to the same species.
This wasn’t just because of racism. Western scientists had been funnelled into a certain way of thinking about the world partly because of where they happened to be based. In the early days of archaeology, Europe was the reference point for subsequent research elsewhere. Before anyone was sure about humanity’s African origins, human fossils in Europe provided the first data. According to John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York, this created an indexing problem. ‘If you have a series of observations, the first observations guide you more so than the latter ones. And our first observations about human evolution were based on an archaeological record in Europe.’ The first movements out of Africa were eastwards, not westwards. This is why you see elephants in both Africa and Asia. Europe isn’t where humans originated – indeed, being so inhospitable back then, it was one of the last places they migrated to, long after going to Australia. But since Europe was where the first archaeologists happened to live and work, this geographical outpost became the model for thinking about the past.
Some of the very oldest human sites in Europe bear evidence of fairly sophisticated cave art. So as a result of indexing, early archaeologists digging on their doorstep logically assumed that art and the ability to think using symbols and images must be a mark of human modernity, one of the features that make us