Scientists Fight To Prove Humanity ‘Born In Africa’ : NPR
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.