Ben Andrews

In the Beginning

Geneticists studying the DNA of today’s world population have discovered that Homo sapiens went nearly extinct sometime between 123,000 and 195,000 years in the past. Since today’s humans show a very low genetic diversity it is most likely that every human alive today can be traced back to the same small group of survivors of that period. According to the research by Curtis W. Marean, a professor of archaeology at the Arizona State University and the associate director of the institute of Human Origins, this small group of survivors, perhaps as small as a few hundred individuals, lived along the south coast of Africa, rich in shellfish and edible vegetation. This group of our human ancestors showed remarkable abilities. They recognized that they could change raw material by heating and could execute a long chain of processes to make the tools they needed. These processes were passed on to the next generations. In a 2010 article in Scientific American, Marean explained how anatomically modern humans survived the MIS 6 glacial stage 123 to 195 thousand years ago, a period during which the human population was limited to only a few hundreds breeding individuals. During this period, sea levels dropped more than a hundred meters and the sloping South African Agulhas Bank was transformed into a plain, on which humans could survive on shellfish and wash-ups from the sea.