Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Neanderthals, the big-brained and large-boned people who lived in north-
ern Europe during the recent ice ages, and those of the more delicate-boned
Cro-Magnon people who replaced them. The Cro-Magnons were considered
by these paleoanthropologists to be the fi rst truly modern humans. This
conclusion was reinforced by the discovery, starting in 1870, of many mag-
nifi cent Cro-Magnon cave paintings.
It seemed perfectly obvious to these scientists of the nineteenth century
that much of the important cultural development of our species had taken
place in Europe. It was therefore quite easy for them to conclude that mod-
ern Europeans are the most highly evolved and the most culturally advanced
peoples on the planet. As the inheritors of the noble Cro-Magnon tradition,
it seemed clear to them that modern Europeans richly deserve the right to
fan out across the world and, as Kipling memorably expressed it, exert their
dominance over “lesser breeds without the law.”
But, starting in the late nineteenth century, a series of disorienting dis-
coveries began to put human history into a much larger context. These dis-
coveries eventually destroyed the Eurocentric view.
Darwin had noted that our closest primate relatives live in Africa. Because
closely related groups of animals tend to live near each other, he concluded it
was likely that modern humans, too, fi rst appeared in Africa.
Darwin's prediction was ignored by anthropologists of the time. The
European Neanderthals were assumed to be the progenitors of modern
humans, who must therefore have evolved in Europe. But in 1891 the Dutch
doctor Eugene Dubois found a skullcap of a small-brained human progenitor
embedded in a muddy bank of the Solo River in central Java. Many more
remains of this progenitor, later called
Homo erectus
, were found in Java, in
several parts of China, in eastern Africa, and most recently in the western
Asian country of Georgia.
In agreement with Darwin's prediction,
H. erectus
originated in Africa.
We now know that these intelligent prehumans migrated into Asia out of
Africa roughly 2 million years ago. Unlike the later Great Migrants, they
managed to cross the desert barriers of the Middle East during periods
when it was more like the East African savannah. And we now know that
