African Archaeology
The Search for the Beginnings of Humankind
About 3.6 million years ago, three early hominids were walking across the plains of what is now known as Laetoli in East Africa when the volcano Sadiman erupted, showering the earth with ashes. A light rain was falling at the same time, and as the hominids continued to walk, each footprint they made was cast into the mixture of muddy ash. When the impressions later dried, the result was two rows of footprints; apparently, two of the hominids walked side by side, the third, perhaps a juvenile, trailed behind the one on the right, stepping in the footprints of his predecessor.
Three and a half million years later, these footprints were to be found by Mary Leakey and her team of archaeologists. The incredible find, however, is more than just an important archaeological discovery, although it is certainly that. The finding of actual footprints from humankind's ancient ancestors represents the true grandeur of the archaeological bounty to be found in Africa, as well as how far the archaeology of human evolution has come. Only fifty years before the footprint find of 1978, very few scientists believed humans had originated in Africa. Practically ignoring Raymond Dart's Taung Baby from South Africa, attention on the search for the earliest humans was focused on China, where the Peking Man skull was found. Scientists such as Sir Arthur Keith, who wrote The Antiquity of Man in 1915, had a great impact on this mal-focusing of attention, arguing that of the major fossil discoveries at the time, the Neanderthal, Peking Man, and Java Man, represented various species of human that existed in ancient times, with the Piltdown man being the true precursor of modern humans (Interestingly, forty years later the Piltdown man turned out to be a hoax which brought together a five-hundred year old human skullcap with the lower jaw and incisors of an orangutan).
What changed all this? Beginning with the extraordinary finds of Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge from the 1930s on, such a wealth of fossils has been found in Africa (especially East Africa) that it became the obvious "cradle" of human life. Over the years, many extraordinary finds have been made (including a great number of species of hominids and other animals), and with each discovery some theories as to the classification of certain fossils are toppled while others have been bolstered. Many scholarly battles have been waged over these classifications, yet after all these years the hierarchy of human evolution is still as contentious as ever.
Although the debates about the true relationships of the hominid fossil discoveries to date will likely not be resolved any time soon, there are three main theories of the evolutionary tree of humans and a much greater number of theories on the actual classification of the fossils with regard to this evolutionary tree. This site explores these theories, as well as the evidence on which the theories are based.
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wilson/ant304/projects/projects97/weimanp/weimanp....
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