Martin Meredith’s

“Born in Africa:

The Quest for the

Origins of Human Life”

By Rachel Newcomb

In 1924, anatomy professor Raymond Dart came across an unusual skull that a mining company had inadvertently blasted out of a hillside in a South African village. Despite its small brain size, the Taung Child, as the skull was to be named, had distinctively human features, including signs that its owner walked upright. But Dart’s finding contradicted prevailing scientific opinion, which held that the evolution of a large brain preceded other human adaptations, such as walking. Confirming this belief was the 1912 discovery of Piltdown Man, a skull found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. With its large cranium but otherwise apelike features, Piltdown Man supposedly represented the missing link between primates and humans, proving that humans came out of Asia and not Africa.

Dart disagreed, and he enthusiastically published his findings. Yet the conservative scientific establishment savaged him, arguing that he had misidentified a mere primate. Among Dart’s other crimes were failing to follow proper research protocol and using “a ‘barbarous’ combination of Latin and Greek in naming the specimen Australopithecus.” After this professional drubbing, Dart suffered a nervous breakdown, and the Taung skull languished for years as a paperweight on the desk of a colleague.

 

(PublicAffairs) - ‘Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life’ by Martin Meredith. PublicAffairs. 230 pp. $26.99

 

Twenty-three years later, Robert Broom, a maverick fossil hunter and physician who conducted his South African excavations under the blazing sun dressed “in a dark suit and waistcoat, long-sleeved white shirt, stiff butterfly collar and somber tie,” made his own discovery of an australopithecine, finally vindicating Dart. In 1953, scientists confirmed that Piltdown Man had been an elaborate 40-year hoax, a skull patched together from a combination of human and orangutan remains and artificially distressed to appear ancient. The Piltdown skull was only a few hundred years old; the Taung Child, however, was eventually dated at 2.7 million years.

Broom’s discoveries finally turned the tide of scientific opinion toward accepting humanity’s origins in Africa. A gold rush of anthropological exploration in Africa followed, its history marked by bitter rivalries, brash pronouncements and breathtaking discoveries. In “Born in Africa,” journalist and historian Martin Meredith has compiled a satisfying account of this quest. The author of numerous historical books on Africa, Meredith here offers a social history of 20th-century anthropological exploration in Africa, one that gives flavor to both the significance of new discoveries and the charismatic personalities who made them.

In 1926, Louis Leakey began what became a successful, multi-generational research enterprise in Kenya. Leakey, his wife, Mary, and son, Richard, went on to make some of the most significant hominid discoveries of the past century. Sites in Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa yielded spectacular specimens, particularly in landscapes whose exploration demanded stamina and persistence. In Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where Mary Leakey first spotted the 1.75 million-year-old skull she referred to affectionately as “Dear Boy,” researchers battled black dust clouds, drought conditions and incessant sun while also having “to contend with marauding lions, rhinoceroses and hyenas.” Later, Richard Leakey’s team found a 1.6 million-year-old, nearly complete skeleton in Kenya’s Lake Turkana, which “resembled a lunar landscape, a boundless expanse of lava and sand littered with the wrecks of ancient volcanoes. The winds and the heat were ferocious.”

Fossil hunting was an arduous and frequently unrewarding business. Sometimes years would pass with no discoveries at all as researchers scrambled to acquire funding and government permits. Although Meredith gives credit to native fossil hunters who unearthed noteworthy finds, the scientists, many of whom were skilled at self-promotion, take center stage. At the start of new fieldwork in Koobi Fora, Kenya, for example, Richard Leakey, “with romantic notions of himself as a heroic explorer riding across the African desert,” hired camels and let the cameras roll. In 1974, when Leakey’s American rival Donald Johanson announced his discovery of the 3.2 million-year-old australopithecine known as Lucy, he shouted on camera, “I’ve got you now, Richard!”

Outsized personalities, turf wars, public insults and heated debates were the order of the day. Meredith outlines these scientific disputes in a clear and accessible manner, and presents a lucid summary of the current scientific thinking on the origins of humanity, with a narrative timeline that traces the chronology of human migration out of Africa. Much like the fossil hunters themselves, Meredith manages to assemble a cogent and compelling narrative from the occasionally messy history of paleoanthropology. “Born In Africa” pays tribute to those intrepid scientists who dedicated their lives to finding the fragments of bone that would illuminate the story of our common humanity in Africa.

Rachel Newcomb is an associate professor of anthropology at Rollins College and the author of “Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco.”

Correction:

Earlier versions of this book review incorrectly identified Kenya as the country in which the Olduvai Gorge is located. The Olduvai Gorge, a site of significant fossil discoveries, is in Tanzania. This version has been corrected.

 

 

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Born in Africa

The Quest for the

Origins of Humankind

 

Africa does not give up its secrets easily. Buried there lie answers to the origins of humankind. After a century of investigation, scientists have transformed our understanding about the beginnings of human life.

 

By Sophy Kohler for The Times

Martin Meredith’s Born in Africa allows us to enter the arcane world of palaeoanthropology with no prerequisites. It is not necessary to have pored over the Piltdown Man case in high school history or to have scrambled up to Blombos Cave and pawed for hours in the dust.

We have others to do these things for us, as did Meredith. Meredith’s task, as the historian, was to recreate the story, to mould the evidence together in a way that made sense. And he does this beautifully, whittling down millions of years into 200-odd pages, without leaving you feeling like you’ve missed out on the details.

Born in Africa is the story of the search for mankind’s ultimate ancestor, the race to reconstruct one heck of a family tree.

For those of us who cannot tell an ancient shell midden from the work of a meticulous oystercatcher, Meredith reduces the grand “quest for the origins of human life” to something eminently digestible.

His method? Studying and aggregating the “work, writings and reminiscences of several generations of scientists”. Meredith dilutes hard science with good narrative, making Born in Africa a rare find within its discipline.

The book begins, inevitably, with Charles Darwin, the “Adam” of evolutionary biology, who first suggested Africa as the birthplace of mankind.

But Meredith does not dwell on Darwin; we leave him behind in favour of lesser-known men like Robert Broom, who raided graves for “research purposes”, and Raymond Dart, a medical student who was forced to study bones instead of brains due to a lack of equipment.

Meredith successfully connects the stories of the individuals and their discoveries, filling the gaps between big finds like Lucy, Taung Child and Mrs Ples, and big names like Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and Elisabeth Vrba.

With the story’s own evolution, the isolation that normally surrounds these eureka moments begins to dissolve.

Meredith’s account is one of discoveries unfolding simultaneously, each often rendering the other void. It is with these interwoven narratives that Born in Africa strikes gold.

In his notes at the end of the book, for instance, Meredith describes Dart as having had a “vivid repertoire of lecture hall tricks”, which included “leaping up and grasping water pipes attached to the ceiling of the lecture hall to demonstrate the brachiation form of primate locomotion; knuckle-walking like a chimpanzee; and performing a ‘crocodile walk’ to illustrate how reptiles moved about”.

However, the author avoids the trap of valorising palaeoanthropology’s key players: he also reveals their flaws. Broom is described as having had “the honesty of a good poker player”. Mary Leaky was expelled from school and Louis Leakey lived “in sin” after divorcing his first wife, Frida.

The book also describes vast amounts of professional rivalry, most significantly following the arrival of the molecular anthropologists, who had the power of DNA and didn’t have to get their hands dirty.

Born in Africa reveals how our search for a common ancestor has so often gone against the human spirit of co-operation.

Meredith continually reminds us that our ancestors were more than just skeletons.

We are forced to consider the possibility that there is no definitive line that separates “human” from “ape” and the consequences of such a possibility. Through Meredith’s eyes, we come to see Neanderthals as more than apes with better posture: we have to create a place for them within ourselves.

Meredith ends the book with the familiar conclusion that we are all descended from a small group of African hunter-gatherers.

While there are still many gaps to be filled, Born in Africa is a healthy, humbling reminder that we are not the finished product. Meredith’s book is refreshing for being the story of men rather than the story of skulls.

>via: http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2011/09/06/clearing-the-dust-a-review-of-martin-m...

 

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Scientists Fight To Prove

Humanity 'Born In Africa'

 

LISTEN TO THE REPORT

 

For years, anthropologists and archeologists believed that Asia held the answers to their questions about the origins of mankind. So when a set of controversial hominid remains was discovered in Africa in the early 20th century, it took a while for scholars to accept that they may have been wrong.

In Born in Africa, author Martin Meredith details the battles, contempt and fraud of the search for the origins of human life.

Meredith tells NPR's Neal Conan that Charles Darwin was the first to speculate that mankind actually evolved in Africa.

"[Darwin] didn't really have any evidence for that," Meredith says, but he figured that since gorillas and chimpanzees were humans' nearest known relatives at the time, and they're most likely to be found in Africa, so too should early humans.

Still, for about 50 years, Darwin's idea was summarily dismissed.

"It was only during the 20th century that the evidence on the ground began to emerge that this piece of Darwin's speculation was likely to prove to be accurate," Meredith says.

The evidence emerged in fits and starts, and was often disputed by those who still believed Asia was the key to the origin of mankind.

"Everybody was looking for what was called at the time [the] 'missing link,'" Meredith says.

In the late 19th century, German biologist Ernst Haeckel theorized that the missing link lay between ape and human populations.

"His scheme of things was that there couldn't have been just a singular move from being an ape to a human, there had to be somebody who occurred in between," Meredith says.

So at the turn of the 20th century, he says, there was a huge, frenzied effort to find the missing link.

"The way was open for fraudsters to claim having found elements of bones and tools, and evidence of ancient humans ... in Southern England," Meredith says.

One so-called discovery became known as the Piltdown Man hoax and, according to Meredith, the people behind it were students of the going theories about what the missing link might look like. Their specimen had a fairly large brain and an ape-like jaw – essentially a mixture of ingredients.

"[They] constructed this so-called missing link and it more or less distorted science in Britain for a period of 40 years," Meredith says.

And because scientists believed it, they dismissed any evidence that didn't fall in line.

"It's extraordinary the way in which a whole scientific endeavor can be manipulated in such a way that the real truth, as it were, is hidden for decades," Meredith says.

So when Raymond Dart discovered a small-brained early hominid, Australopithecus Africanis, in South Africa in 1924, he brought it to England expecting to make a significant contribution to science. But that's not exactly how it worked out.

According to Meredith, Dart's hominid discovery "was laughed out of court."

"The scientific establishment believed that the key element in any human ancestor must have been a large brain — they believed that the brain led the way in human evolution," Meredith says.

Dart's discovery went unvalidated until the 1950s.

"It's an example [of how] scientists cling on to a particular school of thought," Meredith says, "even though there is evidence which is beginning to contradict them."

 

>via: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/12/136247011/scientists-fight-to-prove-humans-born...