had found our common ground?
If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of Europeans, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed? Would they have been welcomed warmly with such tight hugs? It’s hard not to see, in the public and scientific acceptance of Neanderthals as ‘people like us’, another manifestation of the Enlightenment habit of casting humanity in the European image. In this case, Neanderthals have been drawn into the circle of humankind by virtue of being just a little related to Europeans – forgetting that a century ago, it was their supposed resemblance to indigenous Australians that helped cast actual living human beings out of the circle.
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Milford Wolpoff is clear with me that he doesn’t think there is any biological basis to race, that there are no separate races, except as social categories. He comes across as honest and well meaning, and I believe him. But one obvious implication of his multiregional hypothesis is that if different populations became modern in their own way on their own territories, then maybe some became what we today recognise as human sooner than others. ‘A modern human from China looks different than a modern human in Europe, not in the important ways, but in other ways,’ he tells me. ‘So did one become modern earlier than the other one?’ Such a line of thinking opens a door for the politics of today to be projected onto the past, giving rise to racial speculation even if that’s not what he intends.
There is still not enough evidence that any humans became modern outside Africa in the way that classic multiregional theory suggests. Even Wolpoff concedes that Africa must remain at the heart of the story. ‘I will never say that all of modernity is African, but you’ve gotta think that most of it is’ – even if only because in our deep past that’s where most people lived. It is impossible to airbrush Africa out of the lineage of every living person. The genetic evidence we have to date confirms that some version of an ‘Out of Africa’ scenario must have happened.
But over time, the picture inside Africa has changed to incorporate the growing scientific realisation that our origins might have been a little fuzzier than we imagine. In the summer of 2018 Eleanor Scerri at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, together with a large international team of geneticists and anthropologists, published a scientific paper suggesting that rather than humans evolving from a single lineage that can be traced to a single small sub-Saharan African population, perhaps our ancestors were the product of many populations across a far wider area within Africa. These pan-African populations might have been isolated by distance or ecological barriers, and could therefore have been very different from one another. It is multiregionalism, if you like, but within one continent.
‘Gradually we started to emerge from the occasional mixing of the populations that were spread around,’ Scerri tells me. ‘The characteristics that define us as a species don’t appear in any single individual until much later. Before that, the characteristics of our species were distributed across the continent in different places at different times.’ Modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged from this ‘mosaic’. ‘We need to look at all of Africa to get a good picture of origins.’ This version of our past still puts Africa at its centre, as the first home of our ancestors, but it also concedes that modern humans didn’t appear suddenly in one place looking and sounding sophisticated, thinking symbolically and producing art. There was no sudden moment at which the first modern human emerged. The characteristics of us existed in various others before us.
‘Humans evolved in Africa first,’ agrees anthropologist John Shea. ‘Not in just one garden of Eden, but among a broadly distributed population more or less like stops across a subway system. People were moving around along the rivers and coastlines.’ In short, we are a product of longer periods of time and space, a mixture of qualities that incubated in Africa.
According to archaeologist Martin Porr in Australia, this version of the past is more plausible given the way that fossil evidence is scattered across the African continent. For him personally, it also resonates with indigenous Australian ways of defining what it means to be human. Up north in the Kimberley where he has done most of his work, he says, rock art is not thought of as just images upon rock. ‘The rock is actually not a rock but it’s a formation out of the dreamtime that is alive, that is in the living world, that people inhabit. And people themselves are part of that.’ Human and object, object and environment, are not separated by hard divisions the way they are in Western philosophies.
‘You can oscillate in and out of humanity just as objects and animals can oscillate between being human.’ An inanimate object can take on human qualities, the way a doll does to a child. In that sense, too, Porr suggests that what made a being human in the past also oscillated.
‘I think there’s nothing essential about human beings at all.’ This, he explains, is how he has come to think about our origins. Not that our evolutionary journey was one big leap, but that we are the gradual products of elements that already existed, in our African ancestors but also in Neanderthals, Denisovans and other archaic humans. Perhaps some of what we think of as purely human characteristics exist in other living creatures today, too.
It’s a radically different way of thinking about what it means to be us, ditching the European Enlightenment view, and taking a cue instead from other cultures and older systems of thought. It’s a challenge to researchers who have dedicated their careers to identifying the first modern humans and defining what they were like, chasing the tail of the Enlightenment philosophers who thought they already knew. Archaeologists are still trying to hunt down the earliest cave art, the earliest sign of symbolic, abstract thought that will signify the leap from a simpler primate to a sophisticated one, in the hope of pinpointing the magic moment at which Homo sapiens emerged, and where. Geneticists, too, hunt for magical ingredients in our genome, the ones that will indicate what makes us so remarkable. Increasingly the evidence suggests that it was never so simple.
‘Very few people like looking at human origins from a post-colonial context, but there is a broader story,’ says Porr. There are other ways of picturing humanity than as a uniquely special entity far removed from all other living things. Eleanor Scerri agrees that fresh scientific findings are forcing a rethink of what it means to be human. ‘Popular science needs to get away from this idea that we originated, and that was us. There’s never a time that we were not changing,’ she says. ‘The idea of these immutable forms, and that we originate in one place and that’s who we are, that’s where we’re from.’
What does this mean for us today? If we can’t agree on what makes a modern human, where does that leave the idea of universal humanity? If our origins aren’t crystal clear then how do we know that we’re all the same? What does it mean for race?
In a sense, it shouldn’t be of any importance. How we choose to live and treat each other is a political and ethical matter, one that’s already been decided by the fact that as a society we have chosen to call ourselves human and give every individual human rights. In reality, though, the tentacles of race reach into our minds and demand proof. If we are equally human, equally capable and equally modern, then there are those who need convincing before they grant full rights, freedoms and opportunities to those they have historically treated as inferior. They need to be convinced before they will commit to redressing the wrongs of the past, before they agree to affirmative action or decolonisation, before they fully dismantle the structures of race and racism. They’re not about to give away their power for free.
And if we’re honest, maybe we all need to be convinced. Many of us hold subtle prejudices, unconscious biases and stereotypes that reveal how we suspect we’re not quite the same. We cling to race even when we know we shouldn’t. A liberal, left-wing British friend of mine, of mixed Pakistani and white English ancestry, who has never been to Pakistan and has no deep ties to the country any more, told me recently that she believes there is something in her blood, something biological within her that makes her Pakistani. I feel this way occasionally about my Indian heritage. But where does culture end and ethnicity begin? Many of us who cherish our ethnic identities, whether on the political left, right or the centre, perhaps betray some commitment to the idea of racial difference.
This is the problem for science. When