Emily Kern

Historian of modern global science who specializes in the history of human evolution and paleoanthropology. Postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. She is currently at work on a book about the long history of the African origins hypothesis and the search for the cradle of humankind. Her research focuses on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge about the human species and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Articles

Cover for: The use and uselessness of agricultural revolutions

Popular anthropology has recently questioned assumptions about the role of farming in the emergence of the bureaucratic state and the inevitable connection between inequality and urban life. But while it is important to challenge doctrines of civilizational development, their origins must also be examined if conventional knowledge and its blind spots are not to be reproduced.

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