The genius of Charles Darwin shows us that we have so much more in common, as human beings, than we have things that separate us. Once you’ve peeled away the superficial markers of “identity” – like skin colour, shape of nose or mouth, weft of hair – you find we’re all built of the same stuff. Our bodies are the result of about seven million years of evolutionary process that took place right here in Africa.

The “deep roots” of our anatomy evolved in Africa, before colonisation of the rest of the world began. It is only in very recent times, possibly the past 50 000 years, that superficial differences like hair colour and eye shape began to creep in as groups of humans settled into different parts of the globe and began to develop common features in isolation from other groups of humans.

“Our shared species features originated here in Arica,” anthropologist Prof Chris Stringer from the London’s Natural History Museum said during the Nelson Mandela Science Lecture at the University of the Western Cape, on Wednesday. The lecture marked the 150th year since the publication of Darwin’s groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The difference between Spanish and Dutch etiquette is the ‘former never
asking his guest a single question beyond the strictest rules of politeness,
whilst the honest Dutchman demands where he has been, where he is going,
what is his business, and even how many brothers, sisters, or children he
may happen to have.’

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

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The first human-like creature to pick up a pointed stick and use it as a tool to slay another creature changed everything.  Instead of waiting for the accumulation of random genetic variations to impart gradually improving biological tools our creature could create tools itself.

The advantage to humans of being able to organise, teach and use weapons to catch food may initially have been slight.  That marginal advantage has allowed a single species to migrate, settle and dominate their entire planet; something unprecedented in all of Earth history.

This year’s Nelson Mandela Science Lecture will be held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the invited speaker is Professor Chris Stringer, Research leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

His theme is Charles Darwin, Africa, and Human Evolution. Charles Darwin was one of the first to suggest that humans probably had their origins in Africa, but at the time, there was no fossil evidence to support this notion. However, since 1921, there has been a tremendous growth in fossil, archaeological and, most recently genetic, data supporting this idea. Although most experts now accept that Africa was our original evolutionary homeland, there is less agreement about whether it was the only place of origin for our own species Homo sapiens. In this talk Professor Stringer will discuss our African origins and our eventual spread out of the continent to populate the Earth.

The Nelson Mandela Science Lecture is sanctioned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The 2009 lecture is held jointly with the Darwin200 series of lectures, a partnership project of the Africa Genome Education Institute & the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town.

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