Brave New World

01/09/2024

Anthropology • Science and Technology • Culture • Ecology • Books

By CARLOS DE NICOLA*

Comment about the book Brave New World by Bernardo Esteves

Brave New World, by Bernardo Esteves, published in 2023 by Companhia das Letras, is a book that discusses the past, but proposes current questions about the future we desire as a civilization.

Based on a general survey of archaeological studies that refer to human occupation on the American continent, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Esteves encourages the reader to reflect on how science, history and sociology intertwine. The author does so through fluid prose, which is the great distinguishing feature of his text, as it moves away from the professorial tone and allows the reader to construct a story about this history of archaeology and its crossroads. The stage in question is the end of the dispersion of Homo sapiens across the globe, tens of thousands of years ago, precisely in North, Central and South America.

There are two controversies that permeate the narrative. The first of these is linked to the so-called “Clovis People”, that is, to the archaeological findings that relate to a civilization that inhabited North America, the United States and Canada, around 13 thousand years ago – with a very particular type of spearhead artifact. This parameter served as a paradigm of human occupation in the Americas for several decades, including in comparison with archaeological findings that proved to be older in Central and South America.

The paradigm was so solid that, as new archaeological sites were excavated and the 13-year age reached, archaeologists stopped excavating, as if nothing else could exist. According to Esteves, this scientific prejudice concerns the concept of the “missing link”, that is, that it assumes a linear process of evolution, as if civilizations older than the Clovis people were impossible. The idea of “Prehistory” as conceived by historians and archaeologists would only concern Europe.

This resistance is also linked to the adherence to the main migration theory, which proclaims the ancestral human movement between Asia and North America through the now submerged Bering Strait, between Russian territory and Alaska. Therefore, in addition to recording a more ancient human occupation in Central and South America in relation to that in North America, these civilizations would have reached the American continent by means other than those established by archaeology.

The Serra da Capivara National Park, in Piauí, holds important remains of the new discoveries that helped to “dismantle” the Clovis paradigm. One of these fossils, the skull of the so-called “Luzia” – from the Lapa Vermelha Cave, in Minas Gerais – a woman tens of thousands of years old, was burned during the fire at the National Museum, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2018.

The second controversy concerns the genetic database maintained by scientists and institutions around the world, which includes blood samples taken from indigenous peoples in Brazil and elsewhere. Through collections carried out for questionable and non-transparent purposes, a collection of information is maintained – and, ultimately, of active cellular life itself, without the knowledge of these communities. A highlight of Esteves’ prose is when he tells us that, through cellular replicability techniques, the genetic material of indigenous peoples who currently inhabit Brazil is replicated indefinitely in the laboratory – even from dead people – which, given the ethical and religious criteria of these peoples, is completely unacceptable. For example, the Yanomami and the Paiter Suruí in the North of the country.

In the context of the climate emergency and its consequent crisis of civilization, the book is interesting because, through reflections on the past (and on research into the past), it questions paradigms, in this case our own. These civilizations are identified by their remains, but also by the cultural elements that are preserved in the historical sites – the formal conception of the instrument, according to Esteves. For example, ceramics, remains of fires, hunting and gathering materials, among others.

Faced with the mass extinction that presents itself as the only possible horizon due to extreme global warming, how will we, human beings of the Capitalocene of the 21st century, be identified? According to Bernardo Esteves, Homo sapiens It is the only animal species that is capable of “producing extinctions”, that is, the annihilation of other species. Does this occur due to a supposed intrinsic destructive nature or due to a brutal economic system centered on the accumulation of wealth? In a global scientific society that seizes the genetic material of indigenous peoples but does not consider them in the construction of collective solutions to the destruction of the Earth, will it be possible to construct liberating knowledge?

These, among others, are the questions that Bernardo Esteves’ work poses to us. I invite the reader to suck the flesh, bone, and marrow of this “Brave New World.”

*Carlos De Nicola is a member of the socio-environmental movement.

Reference

Bernardo Esteves. Brave New World: A History of Human Settlement in the Americas. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 582 pages.https://amzn.to/3AJCu5j]