Actually prefer the 'false narrative' to the 'truth'...
ACCORDING TO A
commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee.
Mead proceeded to explain, as the story goes, that wounded animals in the wild would be hunted and eaten before their broken bones could heal. Thus, a healed femur is a sign that a wounded person must have received help from others. Mead is said to have concluded, “Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.”
It is, to be sure, a beautiful, “feel-good” story—one that puts kindness, altruism, and collaboration at the heart of being human. One version,
published by Forbes at the start of the pandemic, vaguely references an archaeological site “15,000 years old” where the femur was supposedly found—suggesting that these qualities are deeply embedded in human history. It’s no surprise that the anecdote began
recirculating online during a time of historic uncertainty and isolation.
However, the story immediately aroused skepticism on my part. And the more I dug into it, the more it seemed to fall apart.
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TO START, THERE is no reliable evidence that Mead said what has been attributed to her. Internet sleuths
have traced the earliest reference to this anecdote to the 1980 book
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, in which the surgeon Paul Brand writes that he was “reminded of a lecture given by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who spent much of her life studying primitive cultures.”
But when Mead was asked directly in an interview, “When does a culture become a civilization?,”
her documented response was very different. “Looking at the past,” Mead replied, “we have called societies civilizations when they have had great cities, elaborate division of labor, some form of keeping records. These are the things that have made civilization.”
