Among the riot of species that have lived on Earth over the last four billion years, only we can ponder our own origins and it often angers the blood. We’re long past any serious debate that humanity evolved from apes in Africa a few million years ago, but the scientists looking for ever older bones of our ancestors always seem to be squabbling. A few pages into
Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the
Origins of Humankind, the journalist Kermit Pattison concurs in his riveting account of the discovery of Ardipithecus, a sometimes climbing, sometimes walking proto-human that lived 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia. “In an ideal world, the task should be left to more dispassionate investigators but, since no other species has volunteered, the job is left to us imperfect humans,” he writes.
Welcome to the Ruthless, Cutthroat World of Paleoanthropology
Meave Leakey, now matriarch of the Leakey dynasty, made one of her greatest discoveries in 2001: the flat-faced skull of Kenyanthropus, a 3.3 million-year-old toolmaker.Credit.Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images
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By Steve Brusatte
By Kermit Pattison
By Meave Leakey with Samira Leakey
Among the riot of species that have lived on Earth over the last four billion years, only we can ponder our own origins and it often angers the blood. We’re long past any serious debate that humanity evolved from apes in Africa a few million years ago, but the scientists looking for ever older bones of our ancestors always seem to be squabbling. At least that’s their reputation. Stay away from paleoanthropology, I was told as a young student smitten with fossils, and study less controversial stuff instead, like dinosaurs.