Made in africa

Homo sapiens had ventured out of Africa,says Meredith,about 125,000 years ago into the eastern Mediterranean but the conditions eventually defeated them,and Africa remained the cradle of modern humans for another 70,000 years or so. In time their playground around the Great Rift Valley too experienced extreme conditions,a volcanic winter set in and it is believed that the total headcount of Homo sapiens may have fallen to as low as 5,000. In the “struggle for existence”,those who survived were forced to live by their wits,and humankind saw what anthropologists call a “great leap forward”: they developed better tools,established better social networks,honed their skills as hunter-gatherers and,by some admittedly contested

estimates,to an almost overnight expansion in their brain capacity. Nonetheless: “What appears certain is that by 60,000 years ago,African hunter-gatherers had developed a fully articulate language,making small groups more cohesive and facilitating long-range planning and the transmission of local knowledge and learned skills.”

All humans can trace their origins back to this group 60,000 years ago,and in another few years,well about 5,000 years later,some of them began to venture out,and DNA mapping is now making it possible for individuals to figure out the path by which their ancestors migrated outwards.

The point of this recap is also to underline how natural it is today to state the Great Rift Valley as our ancestral home. But as Meredith shows in the rest of the book,it wasn’t so till quite recently. Academic orthodoxy and cliques for decades resisted and even undermined gathering fossil evidence of mankind’s African beginnings.

In The Descent of Man,published exactly 140 years ago,Charles Darwin had considered the implications of the ape population of Africa: “In each great region of the world,the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies,it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.”

The contention about man’s evolution from the ape threw Victorian England into a fit of indignation. But surprisingly,as Meredith recounts,scientists too could not absorb the idea of direct evolution; they held dear two caveats: that brain capacity “was the original driving force behind human evolution” and that the “missing link”,an intermediate between humans and apes,was to be found in Asia.

Palaeoanthropology has,however,been enriched by mavericks,and Meredith trails the works of men like Raymond Dart,an Australian working in South Africa who brought the Taung Child to the attention of the world 90 years ago. The Taung Child had human and ape-like features; it walked upright but had limited brain capacity. Excited that he had found the “missing link”,Dart announced his discovery to the world in emphatic terms — further setting up academic resistance from the doyens of evolutionary studies,who expected some deference from the newly arrived.

They rubbished him,and it took decades,the work of men and women devoted to the fossil hunt,to have humankind’s African origins accepted,overcoming academic orthodoxy and outright racism.

mini.kapoor@expressindia.com