She named them "human beings"

I might be done re-reading Sapiens, but I’m not done re-reading other books. One such book forces me to continue the Sapiens thread, briefly, today.

For context, this semester I’m re-reading Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King because I assigned it to kick off my Narratives of Human Evolution course. 

Yes, definitely. This course was named after its inspiration: the book Narratives of Human Evolution by Misia Landau. (To get the idea, read this article she published prior to the book in American Scientist: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27852647?seq=1)

Before digging into three best-selling recent narratives of human evolution [the trade books of David Reich (genetics), Cat Bohannon (biology), and Christine Webb (primatology)], we started the course by reading Gods of the Upper Air because I figured some historical perspective might do us some good. I think it did. For one, it’s obvious that we’re right now living at the turn of the 20th century in so many ways. Maybe that’s because many world leaders were born to parents who lived at that time. The future isn’t very futuristic, yet. At least, not in terms of how the science of human biological variation is parlayed into beliefs about human nature.

If you’re reminded of what the book Sapiens was up to, you’re not alone. Remember, in a post last month, I wrote about how Harari used the Dinka as an example of humanity’s evolved tribalism and he seemed to provide evidence for this science-sounding fact about us based on the following, 

“In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people.”

But I wrote about how hard it is to take Harari’s evidence for actual evidence when you know about the following:

In “The Dinka myth: How a South Sudanese ethnic group lost identity,” Mading Peter Angong explains that ‘Dinka’ is a “foreign imposed name that we cannot even define. We are Muonyjang!”

To my revelation via Angong, any reader of Sapiens could respond with something like, okay, but what about the other examples he provides on that page? The Dinka aren’t the only ones whose name means “people” or something like it. You haven’t taken down his overall point merely by taking down one instance of it. And you certainly haven’t disproven the truth of our evolved tribalism.

And, to that imaginary antagonist, I would say that the burden of “proof” is not on the critic of an imaginary human evolutionary tale which is not verifiable, falsifiable, testable against alternative explanations, or knowable. 

And then I would flip to this page in Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air and show them another example of how names of entire peoples’ are born:

The passage is describing one of Margaret Mead and her partner Reo Fortune’s stints in the field, this time in Papua New Guinea, “among a group of people they called the Arapesh.” King writes that, “Their name, in fact, was Mead’s invention based on the local term for “human beings.”

Source: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/10/she-named-them-human-beings.html