Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
in humans living outside Africa (about 2.6 percent in mine, according to a genetic test), but
Homo
sapiens
endemic to the Congo have no trace of
Homo neanderthalensis
in their genes. Nor do they,
the Europeans, or Asians, have the genes of Denisovans, hominids living in Siberia forty to sixty
thousand years ago, though the Melanesian and Australian aborigines share about 3 percent of their
DNA with them. Numerous tribes of early human species likely dotted the earth, interbreeding and
gradually forming our own species as we now know it.
Unlike in other parts of Africa, where volcanic activity has preserved traces of ancient peoples,
the Congo rainforest leaves few fossils. Though migrations have crisscrossed the region, the soil
of the forest is high in acidity, dissolving bones. What we know of human history here is limited.
Before the arrival of the current racial majority, the Bantu, the likely inhabitants were pygmies,
people thought to have evolved smaller because of forest conditions. Modern-day pygmies use non-
Bantu words for many aspects of the forest and its plants, but speak languages derived from their
contact with the Bantu, who spread from Cameroon and eastern Nigeria three thousand years ago.
Empowered by Iron Age technology, the Bantu moved out in successive waves over centuries, in
one of the largest expansions in human history.
Today, there are over seven billion humans, and no other mammal species can claim our rate of
successful adaption. As Dale Peterson writes in
Eating Apes
, a topic that describes some of the fail-
ures of major conservation NGOs and the degree to which logging and the commercial bushmeat
trade are decimating great ape populations, “we are growing rapidly enough to displace, body for
body, the entire world population of chimpanzees every day; rapidly enough to displace, body for
body, the entire world population of gorillas every twelve hours; and rapidly enough to displace,
body for body, the entire world population of bonobos every six hours at least.” The destruction
of other creatures' habitats has allowed this, though increasingly we are looking for other ways of
living, our self-awareness being the trait that can most help us as our climate again changes and
we question the future of our resources. In the process of trying to understand ourselves, we have
become fascinated with our origins. But if we want to reconstruct the path of human evolution, the
best way for us to understand what is lost or left only as rare, incomplete fossils is to consider the
great apes, our closest cousins who are hunted to the verge of extinction. Though the reduction of
great ape habitats likely began thousands of years ago as a result of human expansion, farming, and
hunting, various factors have caused it to speed up exponentially. Booming human populations fuel
the demand for timber and bushmeat, and modern weapons and motorized transportation facilitate
their extraction. Even though laws forbid great ape hunting throughout Africa, they are rarely en-
forced, and few people know about them. Furthermore, as a result of both the local and global de-
mand for palm oil, which is found in many Western household products, plantations are being cre-
ated across Africa, resulting in massive habitat destruction. Lastly, the international race for mineral
resources has funded the recent wars here, displacing communities, destroying the infrastructure,
and forcing millions of people to rely on bushmeat to survive.
I was only beginning to grasp how the rainforest had shaped these people. It was a world of
close horizons, walls of trees blocking my sight, the earth itself suddenly rising or falling, so that
paths had to wind constantly around obstacles. Ever since I was a child, I'd thought in landscapes. I
loved photographs of mountains, deserts, or plains, rolling hills or savannah, and only after staring
at them for some time did I feel that I was ready to learn about their inhabitants, that I might un-
derstand them. But this terrain was unlike any I had known, and since our landing the day before,
