To Save Humankind, Kill Off the Hero’s Journey of Human Evolution

Holly Dunsworth

University of Rhode Island

In Narratives of Human Evolution, Misia Landau revealed that late 19th and early 20th century fathers of human evolutionary theory, including Charles Darwin, unconsciously conformed their stories to the key structural elements of Russian folktales. Dunsworth argues that the enduring habit—within science, academia, and throughout popular culture—of projecting a hero’s journey onto lineages that blend and weave across deep time is fundamental to the perpetuation of untrue patriarchal and racist reconstructions of human origins and human nature, which we continue to enact to our peril, and to the planet’s. In this presentation, Dunsworth breaks down the hero’s journey into its parts and compares them to contemporary human evolutionary biology. In the end, the hero’s journey does not triumph. This presentation is based on a chapter in Dunsworth’s upcoming book (Viking/Penguin, 2025).