On the Human Trail...

 I often wondered what would I want to become when I grew up. This answer kept changing constantly until when I finished my graduation. At that point I was sure I wanted to go into the Oldest human profession and my career started evolving since then.

Wait, Hold your horses… It is not what you think. Banish your nasty thoughts. The oldest Profession that the world has seen is Tool Design and Manufacture. Human Evolution took a decisive step when our ancestors evolved into two legged Humanoids and thereby left their two hands free to do something that improved our life. Last 2 Million Years transformed us. All from a simple Ape like creature that fashioned a rough Hammer for Hunting and slowly the history took a decisive turn. This brought us to the fore front of the Food chain and made us cross the frontiers in space.

Often - not just by the right wing, fundamentalists, but even the Liberal believers - a question that puts people in a corner is, how Science Keeps changing its Answers every time. As new discoveries and Technologies open up, some of the old findings get revised. This is usually construed as the inconclusive nature of science. They compare this against the answers that Organized religion and their scriptures provide to them which they claim is conclusive.

Many of these so-called believers point to the evolution of Man and the role of Gods hand in it.
I have a long-time acquaintance of me, - who is obviously with Right wing extreme organization - came up to me and said, " I don't believe what 'your ' Science says on Human evolution, specifically Darwin's theory. Science is not trustworthy and not dependable as it keeps changing what it says. I believe only my Scripture because it gives me a conclusive answer"

I was for a moment in a bind. Then when I thought about it, I realized that exactly is why Science and its answers are remarkable!

Science goes by the available Data and proof to Define an idea, analyze that to form Hypothesis and further validate it to form theories. Of course, as new data is available and this whole process is repeated and sometimes the theories have to be dumped to form new Theories, findings and their inferences. This how a Democratic system works.

It is easy to imagine something and to hold on to it as a strict dictum without any proof or validation, just by quoting the will of God. That is simply a belief. But it is quite something else to dare the claims of the scriptures and validate them. When someone asserts something as a word of God and refuses examination, I find that imposing and I can never accept it.

Science is a journey that defines and punctuates the human development. If one must understand this, the whole book is about that and about the experience that went with it.

It all started with a bunch of scientists in 19th Century who followed Darwin who was the first to unravel the origin of Humankind.

Expectedly, Darwin's theory, at that time, shook the foundations of Organized religions that had always put man as the superior being and as an image of God. The Catholic religion and every other Organized religion after that, which subscribed to that thought felt the tremors.

The implications of Darwin’s theory were profound. It opened up the possibility of a world without purpose, or direction, or long-term goal, a world that seemed to be no more than a product of chance. It stripped humankind of its unique status and was seen to undermine Victorian respect for hierarchy and social order. Above all, it threatened the very foundations of Christian belief and morality. On one of his visits to the British Museum, Darwin was pointed out by a clergyman as ‘the most dangerous man in England’.

While the highly conservative scientific Community slowly came around his theory, they initially did not subscribe to his ideas completely. Even though they agreed to his theory about Primates being the ancestors of present-day human reluctantly, his thoughts about the Humankind first evolving out of Africa did not gain wide acceptance. Soon there started a mad rush among the scientists to establish that their country as the place of the genesis where the pioneer species evolved - finding the the missing link. Britain, Germany, and France were among the western nations to fiercely go behind that.

This also gave rise to a scam that held the world of science at ransom for almost 40 years. Many Scientists in the UK subscribed and endorsed this either out of ignorance or with some ulterior motive.

“The gap was soon filled by one of the most audacious hoaxes in history—a fossil find that fooled the British scientific establishment for more than forty years. In 1908, it was said, a labourer digging in a gravel pit at Piltdown in southern England found fragments of thick human skull which he passed to Charles Dawson, a local lawyer and amateur fossil hunter. Over the next few years Dawson visited the site frequently, and in 1911 he found another fragment from the same skull. He took his finds to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum and an eminent palaeontologist, who expressed keen interest in them.
In 1912, Woodward set off for a summer of digging at Piltdown, joining Dawson and a French palaeontologist, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. By the end of the season they had found three more pieces of skull bone along with an apelike jaw, assorted mammal fossils and a few crude stone tools—altogether a remarkable haul. Back in London, Woodward pieced together the bits and pieces to produce a reconstruction of the skull; and in December 1912, he unveiled it at a crucial meeting of the Geological Society, naming it Eoanthropus dawsoni—‘Dawson’s dawn man’.
…
A leading neuroanatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, who specialised in brain studies and supported the ‘brain-led-the-way’ school, concurred with Woodward that Eoanthropus dawsoni—or Piltdown Man, as it was popularly known—represented the ancestor of modern humans.“

However, later scientific advances proved this as systematic hoax perpetrated with help of leading scientists of the day.

“when Kenneth Oakley of the Natural History Museum subjected the fossils to a new dating technique, the fluorine absorption test. The tests established that they were relatively modern. Subsequent investigations swiftly revealed the hoax. Every single one of some forty finds at Piltdown had been forged and planted there: The skull fragments belonged to a modern human, 600 years old; the jawbone belonged to an orang-utan estimated to be 500 years old; the teeth had been filed down to produce a human pattern of wear; all the objects had been carefully stained to give them an aged appearance. What was astonishing was that so many eminent scientists had allowed such a crude forgery to pass without challenge for so long. Piltdown Man was no ordinary hoax: It was a systematic campaign carried out over several years. The early skull fragments were created in advance and salted with the intention that more extensive finds would be planted at a later stage. Pieces were put together to fit in with the prevailing view about what an ancestral human should look like. Convinced of its authenticity, some scientists—including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward—continued to work at the Piltdown site for years in the hope of finding more evidence. In 1948, on his deathbed, Woodward had dictated the text of a book entitled The Earliest Englishman.”

When the Hoax was busted, the next focus was on Asia. Nobody gave a second though to Darwin’s thought that Africa could be the cradle of the Evolution. Slowly and painstakingly the field Scientists and Researcher from Africa could convince the reluctant “Experts” from the west who were sitting in the comfort of their Seat in London or some other city in Europe and dishing out their theories. People like Dart, Leakey (s) and Johnson could slowly turn this around by their Ground braking findings from Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa to start with and slowly moving across African melt pot. Lucy, the first upright Hominid to be unearthed had to face Ridicule and outright rejection for having to question the existing notions.

Interesting there were number of politically and Loaded theories also in the existence around the early 20th Century, notably by Nazi Propaganda engine in name of “Science”. To this day that has given various right-wing organizations and Fundamentalists across the globe a motivation to reject Proper established science and to peddle their own “pseudo-science” as an alternate. Martin does not go into those which understandable due to the fact that he is sticking to established research.

“Lucy was the most complete hominid specimen yet discovered. Excavations over the following three weeks yielded more bones; in all about 40 per cent of the main bones of an entire skeleton—discounting hand and foot bones—was recovered. The bones revealed that Lucy was indeed a young adult female hominid, capable of walking upright, standing at just over three feet tall, with an age estimated to be 3 million years”

In the end Africa was firmly in the human evolution Map. The next frontier to be broken was the notion that the Evolution is a Linear cycle from Ape to Human. However, this was also disproved, and the findings indicated that the Evolution was a process with multiple branches where except for the Branch that resulted in Homo Sapiens, other were dead ends. Some like Neanderthals and other Homo variants also went to extinction but not before contributing the total evolution into Sapiens. In this Martin subtly downplays the intermingling of species without explicitly saying it but instead choosing to point to overlapping timelines they existed.

One thing I find very striking is the parallel on how the conservative west initially fought against Darwin’s Theory and against every other breakthrough until the researchers had to work hard to back their claim with more meticulous work and findings. I am reminded of the furor when Keezhadi was unearthed and how the conservative, religious entitled class propped up various outdated “experts” to sully the findings rejecting the latest tools and technology as it did not suit their narrative.

Even within the scientific narration this book addresses, the same conflict existed when the Science and Technology evolved, and newer disciplines were brought to play into this journey. For example, when the research on evolution was started after Darwin, the people who drove the findings were palaeontologists. When Microbiologists started bringing new insights into the research, they invited Scorn from the palaeontologists. Same events were witnessed when Genetics and Advanced Dating techniques were ushered in.

However, in the end these were just noises, and such arguments only strengthened our understanding of Human Evolution History and Scientific Community at large. That is why I don’t give a two hoot to the argument that Religion gives a “Conclusive” answer about anything, less so on the evolution. Though I have nothing against believers - I myself am not an Atheist – still think that such things are best left to Science and undying Human spirit to find the truth.