The roots of humanity remain obscure

To comprehend ourselves and the future of humankind we have to understand where we came from. Unlike the approximately 350,000 known species of beetles on Earth, there is just one existing species of human. It is hard to imagine how our bodies and minds might have been constructed along different design principles or generated even a fraction of such diversity. With our growing ability to manipulate human genomes using gene editing, and the emergence of technologies that may enable human genomes to be rewritten in their entirety, the question of what we might become is no longer theoretical. Should humankind decide to redesign itself, the crapshoot of design by Darwinian evolution may become as redundant as taxi drivers in an age of driverless cars.

We are one of four different types of ape. The techniques of molecular biology have demonstrated that we are more closely related to the African versions — chimps and gorillas — than to orangutans, and closer to chimps than gorillas. Together with molecular evidence indicating that we share a common ancestor with chimps and gorillas around six million years ago, biologists concluded that Homo sapiens is a recent arrival — descended from an as-yet-to-be discovered chimp-like ancestral relative. In this pervasive ‘chimp-centric’ view of evolution, modern humans are made-over naked chimps.

In Fossil Men, Kermit Pattison takes us on a dazzling journey into deep geological time to explore the distant roots of humankind and shows how this ‘out-of-chimps’ theory was up-ended. The narrative focuses on the unearthing of ‘the most important fossil that most people have never heard about’ — the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, or ‘Ardi’ for short. It indicated how bizarre and unpredictable nature’s ‘blind’ rewriting of ancient pre-human genomes could be, and provided tantalising glimpses into human possibility.