Beyond Human Paleontology To Post-Human Paleontology
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is human paleontology really so useful that, as Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “I love the very motto of the Paleontological Society, which meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade…I break in order to reveal”? (BQ 2018) This positive view on paleontology can be contrasted with a thoughtful caveat by Richard E. Leakey, who warned that “when out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate only where they became fossilized.” (TIS 2018)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human paleontology (in relation to smallness and bigness—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no smallness without bigness (and vice versa), to be explained by the “significance-nonsignificance” principle, the “finiteness-infiniteness principle,” the “slowness-quickness principle,” the “absoluteness-relativeness principle,” the “valuation-devaluation principle,” the “evolution-transformation principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” the “functionality-nonfunctionality principle,” the “survivability-nonsurvivability” principle, and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human paleontology, as a field of study, is trivial, or that those diverse fields (related to human paleontology)—such as geology, botany, stratigraphy, palynology, archaeology, chemistry, physics, ecology, climatology, information science, technology studies, religion, political science, sociology, anthropology, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Surely, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human paleontology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between smallness and bigness (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the post-human theory of paleontology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human paleontology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between smallness and bigness—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.