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CRADLE OF MANKIND?

T here are several countries claiming to be the “Cradle of Civilization”: the Tigris-Euphrates region in modern-day Syria and Iraq; the Indus Valley in the Indian subcontinent; the Huang He-Yangtze river basins in China; and the Nile valley, with Africa having the remains, in Egypt, of the great Pharaonic civilization . But the origins of mankind are altogether more difficult to pinpoint. Genetic evidence seems to support the single-origin theory, so it was all the more exciting when, in 2007, researchers at Cambridge University, England, announced that, after analyzing thousands of skulls from around the world, they had reached the conclusion that humankind originated in a single

Words to Understand Civilization: The stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced. Islam: The religion of the Muslims, a faith regarded as revealed through Muhammad as the Prophet of Allah. Precolonial: Relating to a period of time before colonization of a region or territory.

area of sub-Saharan Africa some 50,000 years ago. This would seem to echo a dramatic “new” theory that caused a furore in the late 1980s, that modern man derived from a single African female, although claims of

her being the “mother of mankind” were then called into doubt. What is not in doubt is the work, begun in the early 1930s and continuing to this day, of three generations of the Leakey family, whose first breakthrough was to discover the remains of early hominid types at the Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Other major finds of this kind were also made at Chad, Lake Turkana in Kenya, Hadar (i.e. “Lucy”) and the Awash Valley in Ethiopia, and at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and Taung in South Africa. Among recent discoveries are those in 2001 of Meave Leakey, of a 3.5–3.2 million-year-old hominid skull from the west side of Lake Turkana, and in 2006 of Tim White, of the University of California, Berkeley (who once worked with the Leakeys), who found the remains of at least eight individuals of the species Australopithecus anamensis , dating to 4.1 million years ago, in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia.

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