In the face of both decolonization and the threat of human extinction, many anthropologists in the
Cold War sought to shake the discipline out of what they saw as its post-Boasian doldrums. In this
paper, I use Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, the massive cross-disciplinary symposium of
both social and natural scientists organized by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research in 1955, to examine the question of “history” in anthropology. The Wenner Gren sought
to use Man’s Role to renew dialogue between physical and cultural anthropology towards a new,
unified science of Man, “the first species significantly to affect the course of his own evolution,” for
the Atomic Age. Man’s Role was to delineate a new, species-level natural history of mankind, an
approach championed by natural and social scientists alike, from the historical geography of Carl
Sauer and Richard J. Russell to the organismic models of ecologists like F. Fraser Darling and Paul
Sears. I contrast this approach to the cultural-ecological and materialist emphasis on history placed
by the multilinear “scientific evolutionism” of Julian Steward and his students grouped around the
Mundial Upheaval Society, developed in precisely this period though notably absent from Man’s Role.
The conference’s conception of history as species-unity mapped onto a Cold War universalist
humanism – what Eric Wolf derided as “Man with a capital M” – which starkly contrasted with the
sympathies of Wolf et al. with the emerging politics of decolonization.
