Throughout the world, many cultures have stories relating to the creation of humans in the distant past. The stories vary greatly regarding the mechanisms of creation and the place of creation. The stories often indicate the humans have been here since “time immemorial.” During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the development of the science of geology and the discovery of fossils of extinct animals, some scholars began asking about the actual antiquity of humans.
European science, of course, has its roots in religion, particularly Christianity. Archaeologist Brian Fagan, in his overview of the antiquity of humankind in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, writes:
“Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, both archaeology and paleontology were bound by the rigid confines of Christian dogma, which held that the first chapter of Genesis was the literal historical truth.”
Using the genealogies in the Old Testament, Archbishop James Ussher in 1650 calculated the date of creation to be 4004 BCE. During the twentieth century, methods of dating the past based on geology, biology, and physics have clearly shown that this ethnocentric notion of recent creation is false. Brian Fagan writes:
“While many religious groups still believe fervently in the historical veracity of the Creation, the theory of evolution and modern dating methods have convinced most scientists that humanity originated at least 2.5 million years ago, giving them a vast period of time in which to study evolving human society in a context of time and space.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, European geologists were showing that the earth had been formed by a series of natural processes rather than divine intervention and that these processes required far more than 6,000 years.
In 1797, some beautifully made flint axes were found in a Suffolk, England, lake bed which contained hippopotamus bones. This showed that humans had been around in remote eras in the past since hippos in England were associated with the remote past. This early evidence of human antiquity suggested to a number of scholars that the so-called “Biblical date of creation” might be in error.
By the nineteenth century, viewpoints regarding antiquity were changing. In her book A History of God: The 4,000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Karen Armstrong writes:
“Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which revealed the vast perspective of geological time, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), which put forward the evolutionary hypothesis, seemed to contradict the biblical account in Genesis.”
The ideas regarding biological evolution advanced by Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, and others, were also showing that greater antiquity was needed for changes to occur. It was clear that additional evidence was needed to document human antiquity.
With regard to our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, Carl Zimmer writes in his book Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins:
“All living humans can trace their roots to a small group of Africans who lived less than 200,000 years ago and spread out from Africa about 50,000 years ago. The lineages of hominids that were already living outside of Africa became extinct, and have little or nothing to do with our own origins.”
While there are many paleoanthropologists who feel that the archaeological data suggests that the diaspora of
Homo sapiens may have started as early as 100,000 years ago, the archaeological and DNA evidence for the origin of modern humans in Africa about 200,000 years ago is fairly convincing.
As new data in the form of fossils and DNA evidence began accumulating, by the end of the twentieth century it was clear that our planet had been inhabited by earlier human species, some of which had been evolutionary dead ends. These other human species included Homo habilis (beginning about 2.4 million years ago), Homo ergaster (beginning about 1.8 million years ago), Homo erectus (beginning about 1.6 million years ago, and Homo neandertalensis (beginning about 500,000 years ago). There have been times when several Homo groups inhabited the planet at the same time, and sometimes in the same general location. More data about these early humans is being discovered every year.
One of the difficulties in looking back into antiquity and attempting to understand the lifeways of our earliest ancestors is that the archaeological record is a bit thin. Richard Leakey, in his book The Making of Mankind, writes:
“As we search back through time, towards our origins, we find an ever-thinning archaeological record. Somewhere between two and three million years ago, human artifacts disappear from the fossil record entirely.”
Both DNA studies and the fossil record indicate that sometime between 6 and 7 million years ago, the human lineage and that of the great apes diverged. New evidence from Africa is regularly changing the paleoanthropological hypotheses about the emergence of the first
Homo species.