Human Evolution in Backwaters, Satellites, and Republics: How Political Change Impacts Paleoanthropology in a Shifting Landscape of Winners and Losers

Paleoanthropology has been slow to adopt postcolonial frameworks to assess the validity of interpretations of human origins. This blind spot is made worse when we consider that postcolonial critique is often inappropriate for post-communist spaces. Here we explore the impact of post-communism and the dominant perspectives of Euro-American anthropology on human evolution studies in two places, Croatia and Central Asia.

We present a few fine-grained examples from our own areas of study to examine how the colonial mission and emerging neocolonial relationships have privileged datasets and theoretical perspectives emanating from scholars who study specific places, like Africa, Western Europe, and the Levant, while marginalizing those interested in other geographies.

Imperial Russia, the rise of the Soviet Union, and its fall affected the academy in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia differently than that of the Habsburg Monarchy, Yugoslavia, and the Republic of Croatia. Eurocentrism remains the primary lens through which paleoanthropology is refracted. The dominance of this perspective dictates which regional records are deemed marginal by characterizing them first as discontinuous and then as backwaters, edges, or outposts.

We argue that geopolitical hegemonies support certain topical and methodological foci in science and, in this regard, genetics is ascendant. How do scientists from Croatia and Central Asia (or those who study these regions) negotiate relationships with the new superpower and still maintain their independence and the particular characteristics of their paleoanthropological records? Whose evolution are we attempting to explain?