On The Origin of Man

Outline:

Intro: The importance of heritage
C1: Defining the beginning of man
C2: The usefulness of the current theories
C3: Evolution and its implications for society
Conc: The irrelevance of heritage

I am always surprised at the types of forms I complete that ask for my race/ethnicity. Maybe it was my being raised in a city that was almost completely middle-class caucasian, but I have never really felt the importance of race. However, getting out into the world, I have seen how much it means for some people to identify with their heritage. We have all experienced the feeling of being part of a larger whole. It is rewarding to be able to identify with a certain group. For many young adults (especially males), it feels good to define "us" versus "them"  in a way that justifies the hormone-induced want of conflict. Whatever the reasons, all people like to be part of the group, and defining a heritage is an easy way to do that. No one has to do anything to earn heritage or strike a claim to it. It is a birthright. Either by your birthplace, or that of your ancestors, you need to do nothing more than exist to claim a heritage. For people who do not have another group to claim (e.g. a sports team, a film cult, or a branch of the military), claiming heritage can be the only way to feel a part of anything. If people care so much about where they came from, it follows naturally that they would want to know where their family started.

Unless a family has taken detailed records of their ancestry for millennia, a person of contemporary times would not have the slightest idea from where their first ancestors originated. It is even more difficult to locate the origin of humanity itself. It is commonly assumed that humans originated in one location. Many religious doctrines tell of a single pair of humans that appeared on Earth to rule over all animals. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this location was in the Fertile Crescent in a region that would be modern-day Iraq. Evolutionary theory, though, places the earliest humans in grasslands of Africa, and would not have included one male and one female to perpetuate the race. These proto-humans would have included a family of advanced primates that would eventually lead to a new species.

Archeological evidence suggests that the earliest bipedal hominids appeared nearly 4 million years ago, but recognizable Homo sapiens would have only been found approximately 150,000 years ago. Although other hominids had left Africa a million years earlier, the oldest fossil records for Humans have been found in Africa. Although dating techniques are highly inaccurate (off by over 10,000 years at times), the evidence that modern humans evolved from one group of hominids that lived on the African plains over 100 millennia ago is compelling. All of this evidence supports the idea that humans evolved from other primates that have gone extinct.

Many people find this theory contradictory to their deeply-held beliefs about the origin of humanity. I feel that I was fortunate in that I was never told an unquestionable creation story. I stumbled upon these myths as I grew up and approached them with equal skepticism. I am more inclined, though, to listen to those who develop theories based on evidence rather than rationalizing evidence to fit a preconceived theory.

More importantly, this theory of evolution says something very important about our heritage: we all share the same ancestors. Though people may claim to be of Irish or German or Chinese descent, we are all related to the same group of ancestors who began walking out of the grasslands of Africa over 100,000 years ago. Therefore, the question of heritage is really the most irrelevant one. People want to be part of something, and they are: they are part of a family that touches every part of the globe (and a few distant cousins orbiting above it). To feel part of a larger family, you need only to realize that you are part of the human family.