Compare And Contrast Chaurdin And Leroi-Gourhan

While Chardin and Leroi-Gourhan provide novel accounts of humanity’s development from its primitive state, Lévi-Strauss avoids privileging a narrative of humankind’s progression from primitivism; instead, he is interested in the study of the primitive as a lens through which to view the world. However, all three authors agree that humankind’s progress into the near future will be accompanied by significant transformations in the very nature of humanity, for better or for worse.
In The Phenomenon of Man, Chardin borrows elements of the traditional Darwinian narrative of evolution, while incorporating pieces of the Catechism. In doing so, he delves into the deep past and even describes the moment when life on Earth was created, although he attempts to explain it in terms of divinity. As he begins his account, Chardin asserts …show more content…
In order to use technology and become a more mobile species, the human vertebrae first had to evolve in a very specifically advantageous way. Leroi-Gourhan theorizes that through the evolution of the vertebrae, humans developed an upright stance that freed their hands for grasping. Thus it was not superior intelligence or brainpower that allowed Homo sapiens to prosper, but its ability to grasp weapons and tools, which were essentially, forms of proto-technology.
Throughout this entire narrative, Leroi-Gourhan avoids categorizing the human as a superior species. In this way, his vision of the deep past departs from so many other anthropologists who have tended to view Homo sapiens as special. Thus, Leroi-Gourhan rejects traditional humanism. He goes so far as to reason that humans existed recognizably as humans for so long, that the Darwinian notion of apes that there were multiple forms of primitive toolmakers besides the Neanderthal and Homo