The discovery of a 117 000-year-old set of footprints on the dunes near Langebaan once again places Africa at the centre of the evolution of man. If palaeo- anthropologist Lee Berger’s hypothesis is correct, these prints were left by the earliest humans, whose first home may have been the Western Cape.
They were small feet. According to Berger, the person who made the prints was probably no bigger than a member of the Kalahari San, and he believes she could have been our common ancestor, the Eve who is mother to all.
Today Africa’s detractors dismiss it as a continent of disease, wars, famine and failure – of disasters natural and man- made. Yet the trail of the scientific Sherlock Holmeses who develop grand theories from fragments of bone and fossilised prints constantly leads back to the conclusion that the major evolutionary jumps took place in Africa. It was here that conditions were most conducive to life, growth and development.
It was here that our ancestors first walked upright, first learnt to walk, to talk, to make fire and to craft tools. Successive waves of ape-like creatures may have migrated across the Earth, but all evidence suggests that the biological Eve took her first steps in Africa. It is not hard to imagine the Garden of Eden was the plains of Serengeti or the splendour of the Olduvai Gorge. This would indeed have been a magnificent setting for the dawn of man.
But the surprise is that the fossil finds indicate Eve could have emerged among the rugged koppies and krantzes of the Witwatersrand, or among the sand dunes of the Cape Peninsula. Southern Africa rivals East Africa in the evidence that it has produced of the first human life on the planet.
Today the notion of the rainbow nation has fallen on hard times, torn asunder by the realities of deep-seated prejudice, injustice and hostility among the peoples of our country.
It is important, therefore, to remember that Thabo Mbeki, Eugene Terre’Blanche, Tony Leon, William Makgoba, Charles van Onselen and Barney Pityana all share a common South African ancestor.