Superior

We can’t inhabit minds that aren’t our own.

I was a teenager before I discovered that my mother might not actually know her own birth date. We were celebrating her birthday on the same day in October we always did when she told us in passing that her sisters thought she had actually been born in the summer. Pinning down dates hadn’t been routine when she was growing up in India. It surprised me that she didn’t care, and my surprise made her laugh. What mattered to her instead was her intricate web of family relationships, her place in society, her fate as mapped in the stars. And so I began to understand that the things we value are only what we know. I compare every city I visit with London, where I was born, for example. It’s the centre of my universe.

For archaeologists interpreting the past, deciphering cultures that aren’t their own is the challenge. ‘Archaeologists have struggled for a long time to determine what it is, what is that unique trait, what makes us special,’ says Smith, who as well as working in Australia has spent sixteen years at sites in South Africa. It’s a job that has taken him to the cradles of humankind, rummaging through the remains of the beginning of our species. And this is a difficult business. It’s surprisingly tough to date exactly when Homo sapiens emerged. Fossils of people who shared our facial features have been found from 300,000 to 100,000 years ago. Evidence of art, or at least the use of ochre, is reliably available in Africa far further back than 100,000 years, before some of our ancestors began venturing out of the continent and slowly populating other parts of the world, including Australia. ‘It’s one of the things that sets us apart as a species, the ability to make complex art,’ he says.

But even if our ancestors were making art a hundred millennia ago, the world then was nothing like the world now. More than forty thousand years ago there weren’t just modern humans, Homo sapiens, roaming the planet, but also archaic humans, including Neanderthals (sometimes called cavemen because their bones have been found in caves), who lived in Europe and parts of western and central Asia. And there were Denisovans, we now know, whose remains have been found in limestone caves in Siberia, their territory possibly spanning south-east Asia and Papua New Guinea. There were also at various times in the past many other kinds of human, most of which haven’t yet been identified or named.

In the deep past we all shared the planet, even living alongside each other at certain times, in particular places. For some academics, this cosmopolitan moment in our ancient history lies at the heart of what it means to be modern. When we imagine these other humans, it’s often as knuckle-dragging thugs. We must have had qualities that they didn’t have, something that gave us an edge, the ability to survive and thrive as they went extinct. The word ‘Neanderthal’ has long been a term of abuse. Dictionaries define it both as an extinct species of human that lived in ice-age Europe, and an uncivilised, uncouth man of low intelligence. Neanderthals and Homo erectus made stone tools like our own species, Homo sapiens, Smith explains, but as far as convincing evidence goes, he believes none had the same capacity to think symbolically, to talk in past and future tenses, to produce art quite like our own. These are the things that made us modern, that set us apart.

What separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ goes to the core of who we are. But it’s not just a question for the past. Today, being human might seem so patently clear, so beyond need for clarification that it’s hard to believe that not all that long ago it wasn’t so. When archaeologists found fossils of other now-extinct human species in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they raised doubts about just how far all Homo sapiens living today really are the ‘same’. Even as recently as the 1960s it wasn’t controversial for a scientist to believe that modern humans may have evolved independently in different parts of the world from separate archaic forms. Indeed, some are still plagued by uncertainty over this question. Scientific debate around what makes a modern human a modern human is as contentious as it has ever been.

From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, this might sound absurd. The common, mainstream view is that we have shared origins, as described by the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. Scientific data has confirmed in the last few decades that Homo sapiens evolved from a population of people in Africa before some of these people began migrating to the rest of the world around 100,000 years ago and adapting in small ways to their own particular environmental conditions. Within Africa, too, there was adaptation and change depending on where people lived. But overall, modern humans were then (and remain now) one species, Homo sapiens. We are special and we are united. It’s nothing less than a scientific creed.

But this isn’t a view shared universally within academia. It’s not even the mainstream belief in certain countries. There are scientists who believe that, rather than modern humans migrating out of Africa relatively recently in evolutionary time, populations on each continent actually emerged into modernity separately from ancestors who lived there as far back as millions of years ago. In other words, different groups of people became human as we know it at different times in different places. A few go so far as to wonder whether, if different populations evolved separately into modern humans, maybe this could explain what we think of today as racial difference. And if that’s the case, maybe the differences between ‘races’ run deeper than we realise.

*

In one early European account of indigenous Australians, the seventeenth-century English pirate and explorer William Dampier called them ‘the miserablest people in the world’.

Dampier and the British colonists who followed him to the continent dismissed their new neighbours as savages who had been trapped in cultural stasis since migrating or emerging there, however long ago that was. Cultural researchers Kay Anderson, based at Western Sydney University, and Colin Perrin, an independent scholar, document the initial reaction of Europeans in Australia as one of sheer puzzlement. ‘The non-cultivating Aborigine bewildered the early colonists,’ they write. They didn’t build houses, they didn’t have agriculture, they didn’t rear livestock. They couldn’t figure out why these people, if they were equally human, hadn’t ‘improved’ themselves by adopting these things. Why weren’t they more like Europeans?

There was more to this than culture shock. Bewilderment – or rather, an unwillingness to try and understand the continent’s original inhabitants – suited Europeans in the eighteenth century because it also served the belief that they were entering a territory they could justly claim for themselves. The landscape was thought to be no different from how it must have been in the beginning, because they couldn’t recognise how it might have been changed. And if the land hadn’t been cultivated, then by Western legal measures it was terra nullius, it didn’t belong to anyone.

By the same token, if its inhabitants belonged to the past, to a time before modernity, their days were numbered. ‘Indigenous Australians were considered to be primitive, a fossilised stage in human evolution,’ I’m told by Billy Griffiths, a young Australian historian who has documented the story of archaeology in his country, challenging the narrative that once painted indigenous peoples as an evolutionary backwater. At least one early explorer even refused to believe they had created the rock art he saw. They were viewed as ‘an earlier stage of western history, a living representative of an ancient form, a stepping stone’. From almost the first encounter, Aboriginal Australians were judged to have no history of their own, surviving in isolation as a flashback to how all humans might have lived before some became civilised. In 1958 the late distinguished Australian archaeologist John Mulvaney wrote that Victorians saw Australia as a ‘museum of primeval humanity’. Even until the end of the twentieth century writers and scholars routinely called them ‘Stone Age’ people.

It’s true that indigenous cultures have enduring connections to their ancestors, a continuation of traditions that go back millennia. ‘The deep past is a living heritage,’ Griffiths tells me. For Aboriginal Australians, ‘it’s something they feel in their bones … there are amazing stories of dramatic events that are preserved in oral histories, oral traditions, such as the rising of the seas at the end of the last ice age, and hills becoming islands, the eruption of volcanoes in western Victoria, even meteorites in different times.’ But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that ways of life have never changed. European colonisers failed to see this and it would take until the second half of the twentieth century for that view to be corrected.

‘There was certainly little respect for the remarkable systems of understanding and land management that indigenous Australians had cultivated over millennia,’ explains Griffiths. For thousands of years the land has been embedded with stories and songs, cultivated with digging sticks, fire and hand. ‘While people have lived in Australia, there’s been enormous environmental change as well as social change, political change, cultural change.’ Their lives have never been static. In his 2014 book Dark Emu, Black Seeds, writer Bruce Pascoe argues, as other scholars have done, that this engagement with the land was so sophisticated and successful, including the harvesting of crops and fish, that it amounted to farming and agriculture.

But whatever they saw, the colonisers didn’t value. For those raised in and around cities, industrialisation is still what represents civilisation. ‘The idea of ranking, say, an industrial society higher than a hunter-gatherer society is absurd,’ reminds Benjamin Smith. It’s not easy to accept when you’ve grown up in a society that tells you concrete skyscrapers are the symbols of advanced culture, but when viewed from the perspective of deep time – across millennia rather than centuries, in the context of long historical trajectories – it becomes clearer. Empires and cities decline and fall. It is smaller, indigenous communities that have survived throughout, those whose societies date to many thousands rather than many hundreds of years. ‘Archaeology shows us that all societies are incredibly sophisticated, they are just sophisticated in different ways,’ Smith continues. ‘These are the world’s thinkers, and maybe they thought themselves into a better place. They have societies that have more leisure time than Western societies, lower suicide rates, higher standards of living in many ways, even though they don’t have all of the technological sophistication.’

Respect for and pride in indigenous cultures has only started to build in the last few decades. And even now, there remains resistance among some non-indigenous Australians, especially as it has become clear from archaeological evidence that Aboriginal people have been occupying this territory not for just thousands of years, but for many tens of thousands. ‘The mid-twentieth century revelation that people were here for that kind of depth of time … was received in many ways as a challenge to a settler nation with a very shallow history. There are cultural anxieties wrapped up in all of this,’ says Griffiths. ‘It challenges the legitimacy of white presence here.’

Among European colonists in the nineteenth century, there was a failure to engage with those they encountered, to accept them as the true inhabitants of the land, combined with a mercenary hastiness to write them off. Alongside the native people of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, whose nakedness and apparent savagery had shocked biologist Charles Darwin when he saw them on his travels, indigenous Australians and Tasmanians were seen as occupying the lowest rungs in the human racial hierarchy. One observer described them as ‘descending to the grave’. They were, Griffiths tells me, seen as doomed to go extinct. ‘That was the dominant concept, that they would soon die out.

‘There was a lot of talk of smoothing the pillow of a dying race.’

Smoothing the pillow was bloodthirsty work. Disease was the greatest killer, the forerunner of invasion. But starting in September 1794, six years after the First Fleet of British ships arrived in what would become Sydney, and continuing into the twentieth century, hundreds of massacres also helped to slowly and steadily shrink the indigenous population by around 80 per cent, according to some estimates. Many hundreds of thousands of people died, if not of smallpox and other illnesses shipped to Australia, then directly at the hands of individuals or gangs, and at other times of police. Equally harsh was the cultural genocide, adds Griffiths. There were bans on the practice of culture and use of language. ‘Many people hid their identity, which also contributed to the decline in population.’

In 1869 the Australian government passed legislation allowing children to be forcibly taken away from their parents, particularly if they were of mixed heritage – described at the time as ‘half-caste’, ‘quarter-caste’ and smaller fractions. An official inquiry into the effects of this policy on the indelibly scarred ‘Stolen Generations’, finally published in 1997, is a catalogue of horrors. In Queensland and Western Australia, people were forced onto government settlements and missions, children removed from about the age of four and placed in dormitories, before being sent off to work at fourteen. ‘Indigenous girls who became pregnant were sent back to the mission or dormitory to have their child. The removal process then repeated itself.’

By the 1930s, around half of Queensland’s Aboriginal Australian population was living in institutions. Life was bleak, with high rates of illness and malnutrition; behaviour was strictly policed for fear that they would return to the ‘immoral’ ways of their home communities. Children were able to leave dormitories and missions only to provide cheap labour, the girls as domestic servants and the boys as farm labourers. They were considered mentally unsuited to any other kind of work. Historian Meg Parsons describes what happened as the ‘remaking of Aboriginal bodies into suitable subjects and workers for White Queensland’.

Among those forced to live this way were the mother and grandmother of Gail Beck, an indigenous activist in Perth who was once a nurse but now works at the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, fighting to reclaim land rights for her local community, the Noongar. When I visit her at her home in the picturesque port city of Fremantle, speaking to her as she cooks, awaiting a visit from the Aboriginal Australian side of her family, I find someone who has few ways to quantify the pain and loss.

Gail is sixty years old but her true family story is still fairly new to her. Until her thirties, she didn’t even know she had any indigenous ancestry. She had been raised to believe she was Italian – a lie to explain her olive skin, her mother terrified that if she were told the truth, Gail might be taken away by the authorities as she herself had been. So she lived under a conspiracy of silence, shielded from the fact that her grandmother had been one of the Stolen Generations, a ‘half-caste’ taken from her family to live in a Catholic missionary home in 1911 at the age of two. There, she had been abused, physically, mentally, sexually. ‘She was put out to service at thirteen. Didn’t get paid, nothing like that. And she stayed there until she was an adult.’ A similar fate befell Gail’s mother, who was under the supervisory care of the nuns in the home from the day she was born, beaten and burned by them when she grew older. The Sisters of Mercy ‘were very cruel people’, Gail recounts.

Learning about her family’s past, and having it confirmed by her grandmother’s papers, was a bolt from the blue. ‘I cried an ocean of tears.’ At once, Gail gained a new identity, one that she was desperate to understand and build a connection to. It took her six years to find the part of her family that had been hidden from her, and she has devoted herself to absorbing their culture ever since. She shows me her blankets and pictures, adorned with the prints for which Aboriginal Australian artists have lately become famous. She has tried to learn an indigenous language, but it has been a struggle. She lives like most white Australians, in a nice house in a nice suburb, her knowledge of her great-grandmother’s way of life, as it would have been, fragmentary.

‘We are constantly in mourning, and people don’t understand that,’ she tells me. ‘The young children that were lost, that doesn’t just affect the nuclear family, that affects the community.’ And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, that the way of life she might have had, the knowledge and language she could have been raised with, the relationship to the local environment, all of this was trodden beneath the boot of what considered itself to be a superior race. After the arrival of the Europeans, even the creation of art sharply declined. It took until 1976 for Aboriginal people even to be able to gain legal rights over their land. Throughout, the victims had no choice. ‘They weren’t allowed to practise their culture, they weren’t allowed to mix and they weren’t allowed to speak their language.’ Having been told they were inferior, that theirs was a life to be ashamed of, they adopted different ways of living – ways they were told were better.

‘It was a real shameful thing.’

*

I don’t cry easily. But in the car afterwards, I cry for Gail Beck. There is no scale of justice weighty enough to account for what happened. Not just for the abuse and the trauma, the children torn from their parents, the killings, but also for the lives that women and men like her didn’t have the chance to live.

In recent decades, as scholars have tried to piece together the past and make sense of what happened, as they share with ordinary Australians in the long process of assessing the damage and its impact, we can see an overarching story about the definition of human difference. It shows us how people have drawn boundaries around other groups of people, and how far inside us and how far back in time the disparities are thought to stretch. These are the parameters of what we now call race.

That same day I meet with Martin Porr, a German-born archaeologist who works at the University of Western Australia, his work focusing on human origins. He feels, as do many archaeologists nowadays, that his is a profession weighed down by the baggage of colonialism. When the first European encounters with Australians happened, when the rules were drawn for how they should be treated, science and archaeology began to be woven in. And they have remained interwoven ever since. For Porr, this tale begins with the Enlightenment, at the birth of Western science. The Enlightenment reinforced the idea of human unity, of an essential biological quality that elevated humans above all other creatures. We live with that concept to this day, seeing it as positive and inclusive, a fact to be celebrated. There was a caveat, however. As Porr cautions, this modern universal way of framing human origins was constructed at a time when the world was a very different place, with far less understanding of other cultures. When European thinkers set the standard for what they considered a modern human, many built it around their own experiences and what they happened to value at that time.

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.