Kuljian C. Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South Africa and provides fresh insight on the search for human origins – in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics – over the past century. The book follows the colonial practice in Europe, the US and South Africa of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into racial types, in the hope that they would provide clues to human evolution. Kuljian sheds light on how, during apartheid, the concept of racial classification mirrored the way in which many scientists thought about race and human evolution.
In Chapter 6: The Search for /Keri-/Keri, a report is given on an investigation Dr Houlton pursued to identify and restore dignity to a ‡Khomani San individual whose body was cast post-mortem during the height of typological research practices.