Like all good detective stories, ours starts with footprints in the mud...
The year, 1978: An early summer evening. Huddled around a few square meters of ground, researchers are carefully removing a crust of soil from one of the most extraordinary sights for a paleontologist: a series of footprints left in volcanic ash over three and a half million years ago by two or perhaps three hominids. We are in Laetoli, a locality to the south of the Serengeti Park in Tanzania. From here, our ancestors, walking erect as we do, made their way northward across the savannah.
Where did they come from? And where were they going?
The findings as Laetoli provide a good beginning for our story. The footprints trace a fine line between two worlds: beyond them is the human race, behind them the shadows of evolution. Almost nothing remains of the history of our species prior to these footprints; a long trail of findings providing the basis for theories and debate follows.
How far back can you trace your family tree? Most people cannot go beyond their great-great-grandparents. The oldest written records recount only our most recent past. The farther back in time we go, the fewer the surviving traces. How can we know about the lives of our ancestors who lived 30,000 - or 300,000 - or 3 million years ago?
In The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins, Piero and Alberto Angela address the many difficulties and challenges in assembling a truly complete picture of human evolution. In tracing our origins, different "documents" and "evidence" must be used: rock sediments, footprints and fossils that were petrified in the folds of the earth over the course of millenia but have become the object of scientific study only in recent decades.
To piece together the intriguing puzzle of human origins it is necessary to study all clues that are made available by multidisciplinary research, including paleontology, biochemistry, geology, genetics, physics and climatology. Like so many Sherlock Holmeses, researchers seek all possible clues and analyse them meticulously in hopes of being able to reconstruct the past. Just as a cigarette butt, a hair, or a button may provide the key to identifying the "culprit" in a detective story, so can the layert of a fossil, the way a rock has been chipped, or the detail of a joint offer important information on thge life, appearance, and behavior of our ancestors. These pieces are few and fragmentary, ranging from the footprints left in volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago by hominids who walked exactly as we do, to a "Y" pattern on molars and mitochondrial DNA. But they all provide informattion on the diet, diseases, hunting techniques and art of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, the Neanderthal and the first Homo sapiens sapiens.
Written in an accessible but authoritative style, this study includes many lively reconstructions of the everyday life of our earliest ancestors based on the most reliable data. The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins makes available to a wide audience a unique look inside the exciting world of research into the study of the beginnings of human life on earth.
Piero Angela, a well-known journalist and best-selling author in Italy, is also the host of a number of popular TV programs on science, technology and the environment. He is a staunch advocate of science literacy and a founder of Italy's Skepticism Group.
Alberto Angela, who holds a degreee in natural science from the University of Rome, has also studied at Harvard, Columbia and UCLA. He has taken part in paleontological researches in Zaire with Noel Boaz and in Tanzania with Donald Johanson. In 1989, he participated in a study of pre-hominds in Oman directed by Herbert Thomas of the CNRS, Paris.