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Darwin's Hunch
Darwin's Hunch

Darwin's Hunch

Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins

HISTORY

352 Pages, 6 x 9.25

Formats: Trade Paper

Trade Paper, $24.95 (US $24.95) (CA $33.95)

Publication Date: July 2017

ISBN 9781431424252

Rights: US, CA, AU & NZ

Jacana Media (Jul 2017)

Sorry, this item is temporarily out of stock
 

Overview

Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South Africa and provides fresh insight on the search for human origins – in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics – over the past century. The book follows the colonial practice in Europe, the US and South Africa of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into racial types, in the hope that they would provide clues to human evolution. Kuljian sheds light on how, during apartheid, the concept of racial classification mirrored the way in which many scientists thought about race and human evolution.

Author Biography

Christa Kuljian is a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007. Kuljian studied with palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould for her BA in the History of Science at Harvard (1984), which provided inspiration for Darwin's Hunch.