It is a fact widely accepted that Africa is the foundation of the human race. This idea of humans originating from Africa was first found in Charles Darwin’s famous book “The Descent of Man” in 1871 where he postulated that it was “probable” that Africa was the cradle of humans because our two closest living relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—live there. By the 20th century, after an uncountable number of debates, theories, experiments, studies, and research, the world’s leading scientists and researchers came to the agreement that Africa is the home to the origin of the species- human beings. However, it was in the year 1924 when Raymond Dart, an Australian-born anatomist working at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, found the fossilised mould of a brain in two boxes of rocks blasted from a limestone quarry near the town of Taung were delivered at his house. Dart believed the brain to belong to some kind of human—perhaps an ancient human ancestor. After this, the number of evidences supporting human origins in Africa has surpassed our memory to date.
Recently, a team of international researchers, which included Mary Prendergast, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology and chair of humanities at Saint Louis University’s campus in Madrid, and a co-supervising author of the study, dug deep to find some of the oldest African DNA on record, in a new study published in the multidisciplinary scientific journal/magazine Nature. The team sequenced DNA from four children buried 8,000 and 3,000 years ago at Shum Laka in Cameroon, a site excavated by a Belgian and Cameroonian team 30 years ago.
“Our analysis indicates the existence of at least four major deep human lineages that contributed to people living today, and which diverged from each other between about 250,000 and 200,000 years ago,” said David Reich, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, senior author of the study.
The geographical area around which the research revolves is interesting to note because this part of west-central Africa – the ‘Grassfields’ region of Cameroon – has been identified as the probable cradle of Bantu languages, the most widespread and diverse group of languages in Africa today. For decades, linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists have investigated the origin of Bantu languages and their spread.
This research has added another milestone towards understanding the deep-rooted lineage of mankind and nature. Hopefully, this research will help other researchers around the world to connect the dots of the mystery of the origin of the human race.
Dibyasha Das