ABSTRACT
The crucial distinction between palaeoanthropology and palaeontology lies in the fact that the palaeoanthropologist studies our ancestors, who are universally sacred; and is engaged in the process of naming the ancestors, which is invariably filled with symbolic power. The act of creating one’s own ancestors is a universal and mythological practice. It is familiar through kinship studies in any number of ways: adoption, marriage, emphasising some ancestors over others, name-changing, and good old-fashioned imaginative invention. Genomics in a neo-liberal economy is particularly susceptible to apophenia, because there may be money in scientifically recreating an imaginary past and inserting a customer into it. While prehistoric human populations must have been structured, the trend of scholarship has been to decouple samples and specimens from taxonomies. The scholarly study of one’s own ancestors and relatives involves reflexivity, not objectivity; and is an anthropological, not a biological, exercise.
