Once We Were Not Alone

IN the previous chapter I suggested that it was strange that small-brained proto-humans had reached all the way down to South Africa from the Ethiopian heartland, but apparently had not made it into the Middle East which was so much closer. Until very recently the prevalent view was that it was Homo erectus who first managed to break out of Africa and disperse across Eurasia. We saw in the Prologue how the strict political division of continents, a distinction that has never existed other than in our minds, complicated our understanding of how early primates and apes got to where they did. The same simplistic distinction has been widely applied in the human origins debate. I think that this way of carving up the Afro-Eurasian land mass has held back progress in our understanding of what really happened, and how it happened, by more than two decades. We are only now just starting to recover from the negative effects of ‘out-of-Africa migration’ dogma and see human origins in a different light. I was lecturing in Cambridge when the news of the discovery of the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) was released in 2004. The anthropological community was in shock as nobody could have predicted that humans of any description, other than us, could have managed to survive on the planet until so recently. Most people were trying to find an explanation. As usual, others sat on the fence to wait to see which way the wind would blow, while the predictable staunch minority was doing every-thing possible to debunk the new claim. When something does not fit a long-established scheme, the usual response is disbelief, which rapidly turns into ridicule.

Archaeology · Carving · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Genealogy · Geography · Homo erectus · nobody · History · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology