The battle for our past

READING THE BONES: Martin Meredith, the author of Born in Africa. Picture: Cindy Waxa

READING THE BONES: Martin Meredith, the author of Born in Africa. Picture: Cindy Waxa

Published Sep 8, 2011

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Reading this book on the origins of humans in Africa feels at times as if we are witnessing as much a fist fight as an academic debate. One archaeologist has described the struggle in archaeology as one of “back-stabbing, treachery and bloodletting”.

It’s that intense rivalry that has led to eminent professors such as Raymond Dart having nervous breakdowns. Fierce rivalry forces scholars to defend and prove their theories, of which only the most successful will survive.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Charles Darwin has been vindicated, not only for his “survival of the fittest” theory, but for his prediction, in 1871, that the “most likely” home of humans would turn out to be Africa, given that it is also the homeland of our closest relatives, gorillas, chimpanzees and apes.

But few could foresee the long, hard slog, riven with tension, that would finally explain and confirm human evolution.

Perhaps the most surprising event is that we are here at all. Several strands of early hominids developed, of which only one survived.

Martin Meredith, an African correspondent for the Observer and the London Sunday Times for 15 years and later a research fellow at Oxford, has written a dozen or so books about Africa, but this, I confess is the one that had my pulse racing. I even took a clutch of early to middle Stone Age hand axes to the interview. Luckily, he seemed pleased.

He has provided a thrilling, readable and coherent account of the “race to find human origins”, and provides lively renditions of some of the larger-than-life characters who pepper the story. “Many of them were outsiders,” he points out.

Persistence is the key to palaeontology, he stated, citing the patient work of Mary Leakey, who 50 years ago worked in the shadow of her far more famous husband, Louis, in the Rift Valley, and her unschooled but ambitious son Richard, whose unexpected act of filial betrayal is detailed in Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life (Jonathan Ball Publishers).

The author also includes the remarkable insight of UCT graduate Elisabeth Vrba, now a professor at Yale, whose “Saturday morning” job dating the fossil record of African antelopes led her to her ground-breaking theory of climate change, and the pressure it exerts on any given species. It can take just such a sharp shock to weed out the least fit in forcing a species to adapt to survive and, indeed, whole species to disappear. This became her “Turnover Pulse Theory” of evolution, and although some scoffed at the time, it is now widely recognised as fundamental to why there are long periods of very little change in evolution, followed by sudden, rapid ones.

Dart, whose insight into the Taung skull showed that Darwin was right in predicting Africa as our birthplace, was ridiculed by the “Establishment”, many of whom were convinced that humans originated in Asia. He had a devastating breakdown, although decades later was vindicated by the even more controversial Robert Broom (who was once banned from working in the South African Museum – he had scant respect for academics).

Although Meredith emphasises the importance of teamwork in palaeontology – finding a shard of bone can be like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Table Mountain – he has particular words of praise for pioneers such as Ron Clarke, whose “instance of individual brilliance” enabled him to locate Little Foot in 1997 at Sterkfontein, the first complete skeleton of Australopithecus.

Archaeological finds in the past 20 years have pushed back human origins millions of years, further than had ever been considered, and mitochondrial DNA testing has shown that all humans came from the same “branch”of African ancestors, including the San, who roamed not only southern but east Africa.

So is there any substance to believing in a “missing link”?

“There are many missing gaps,” says Meredith carefully, with a smile. “What I’ve done is to try to provide a ‘ladder’ to link the finds together. There is no straight line: but there is enough of an outline for us to now know where those ‘gaps’ lie.”

Meredith says he wanted to write a readable book about humankind and our relationship to the ape community, and he has done that admirably and, in some passages, thrillingly.

Born in Africa shows that at least 20 species of humans are extinct, that Africa is the birthplace not only of humankind, but of all modern humans, and how early technology, the ability to walk upright and use language, and the discovery of cooking, all made essential contributions to our survival as a species. Then 60 000 years ago, humans spread out from Africa in an exodus to populate the rest of the Earth. It just has to be the greatest story told – irresistible reading. - Daily News

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