Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the later Neanderthals of Europe also originated in Africa, probably from
a
H. erectus
lineage. It is likely that the ancestors of the Neanderthals made
their way into Europe and the Middle East starting about a million years
ago.
African human origins were soon driven much further back in time by a
fi nd in South Africa. In 1924 Raymond Dart, an Australian-born anatomist,
was sent a scientifi c oddity by the owner of a nearby quarry. It was a tiny ape-
like skull embedded in a chunk of quarry stone. Dart thought at fi rst that the
skull was that of a fossil ape, but when he fi nally freed the lower jaw from the
rest of the skull he found that its teeth were not apelike. He had expected to
see a typical ape dentition, with prominent canines and with cusps on the
molars and premolars that lock the upper and lower jaws together. Instead
he found that, like the teeth of modern humans, the teeth of this “southern
ape”
Australopithecus
had small canines and fl attened molars. This meant that
its lower jaw could have shifted from side to side in order to grind food rather
than just crush it.
Dart's skull was probably less than 2 million years old, but since its dis-
covery a variety of Australopithecines have been found that date back more
than 4 million years. This diverse set of African species has added to the
growing number of species in our own ancestry, as distinct from the ances-
try of the great apes such as the chimpanzees and gorillas. Together, we and
our ancestors, along with other branches on the human-like family tree such
as the Australopithecines, are now put in the subtribe Hominina and called
hominans. All the hominans and chimpanzees grouped together make up
the tribe Hominini and are called hominins.
After all these discoveries, and after the discovery of precise ways to date
the fossil fi nds in their context, it is clear that both the fossil and the molec-
ular evidence are unequivocal about our African origin. Not only did the
many-branched lineages that led to the Australopithecines and to
H. erectus
arise in Africa, but so did the lineage that led to modern humans.
By the early twentieth century it had become clear that Darwin was right
about our origins, as he was about so many other things. The Eurocentrics
had been handed a decisive defeat.
