This is the start of a journey bringing you the history of the African people from the beginning of time to the modern era. A TV series based on a unique project put together by UNESCO known as the General History of Africa. Africa's history written and told by Africans. Africa has the longest history of anywhere on earth because it is here that humankind originated. In the past, expert opinion was divided about this, but now the debate is closed.
This is where it all began for us humans, and it was from Africa that we migrated to other parts of the world. In this program, I'll be following the trail of evidence on human evolution. East Africa's Rift Valley is where we begin.
We evolved here over millions of years. Here in Tanzania, the landscape looks much like it would have done at the time of early humans. The contours of the land sculpted by volcanic eruptions.
The Ngoro Ngoro crater behind me is the world's largest and most complete volcanic crater. Early humans and their ancestors... have lived in its ecosystem for more than three million years. It's believed that a hunter-gatherer culture existed with tribes migrating in and out of the area as they have done until recent history. Across this dry riverbed, little more than 100 kilometers away from the Ngoro-Ngoro crater, There exists a group of people who live by hunting and gathering their food from the wild, much as our ancestors did.
They are the Hadzabe tribe and they live on the edge of Lake Iasi. I need a local guide, David Maragu, to take me, because this tribe lives in isolation from modern society. And David has spent many years getting to know them. He's taking me into the bush to meet them. The Hadzabe are unique in that they are the only big game hunters left in the world who live purely from what they kill or find growing wild.
They don't keep animals or grow food, and they move around to new hunting grounds every few weeks, building temporary shelter as they go. There are only about a thousand of them in all, and they live in small autonomous communities. This is one of the more accessible groups. I'm keen to meet the Hadzabe. because they hold valuable insights and provide many examples of how we humans have lived for most of our history.
They welcome me warmly and I'm immediately struck by the fact that the group meeting me are all male. The modern clothes, by the way, have been given by charities. They would normally be semi-naked, dressed in covers made from animal skins. And awesome just about sums up how I feel about meeting them. Abanebeto, akwetemayando, akaya sanjadina Akwetemayando, akwetemayando, akaya sanjadina They hunt with bows and arrows, making their own weapons.
And they start a fire in the traditional way. They don't have any matches to speed up the process. So David now I'm coming to say hello to the ladies. Yes.
I'll let you go first. I've forgotten how you say hello already. Hello.
Mutana Aya. Mutana Aya. Mutana Aya.
Mutana Aya. Mutana Aya. Mutana Aya. Mutana Aya. So the men and women stay separately?
The women and men stay separately. Clip together Everybody doing our different activities This is nobiko which in the Hadza Bay language means baobab a fruit that's consumed widely across Africa The women are so welcoming and don't seem to mind at all that I'm interrupting their craft making I want to ask these ladies just how they spend their day. What is a typical day for them? Ayah. Ayah.
Ayah. Hamana. I don't say my name, my name, my name, never turns out to be ayah. I don't say my name, my name, my name, never turns out to be ayah. By bringing, collecting the food and by feeding with the kids.
The women obviously are the gatherers, the foragers. So, I mean, what kind of things do they go and forage and gather? What do they eat?
What do you plant? Shumuku. They're digging the roots which is called shumuku. It's one that's getting from the ground.
They have a lot of water and have a lot of nutrition. So they can eat fresh or they can cook. Since their lifestyle is so similar to that of our ancestors, the Hadzabe tribe have been closely studied by academics. Professor Audax Mabula at Tanzania's National Museum in Dar es Salaam tells us this is how humans have lived for 99% of our existence. Our earliest ancestors, including early anatomically modern humans or early Homo sapiens, sapiens, hunted and foraged.
They had natural food, foraging for tubers, digging out tuber roots, foraging for different types of berries, killing animals, killing birds. And why these sometimes are known, particularly the Hadza, they are known as egalitarian hunter-gatherers. They don't store food.
Whatever they collect, they consume. And if they kill a big animal, they cannot keep it for more than five days. They consume immediately. But their food is very, very nutritious.
And evidently, it's not fatty like the processed foods many of us consume. In fact, I don't see one overweight adult or child amongst the Hadzabe. As well as foraging, the women search for small mammals and insects.
Choo Nobuko gets the lion's share of the roast mouse, though she does give a titbit to one child. However, Nobuko does take the lead in sharing what the women find with the men, and whatever they forage from the bush supplements what the men are able to provide from hunting. Some of it is cooked to make it tastier and easier to digest. Some experts believe early humans began cooking their food around 1.9 million years ago when they discovered how to make fire.
This meant they didn't have to spend hours and hours a day chewing food, them for other activities. The Hadzabe prefer to live like our ancestors. They've been offered housing and farmland by successive governments in Tanzania, but they choose to maintain their traditional lifestyle.
I want to know a bit about these people. Have they been to see modern life, cars? Houses. I have a car, I have a house, But the car, in normal, modern life, never.
They're not interested in it. Mobile phones are very popular here in Tanzania. It's a good way of communicating from distances. How do they communicate? They're not interested in it.
They're not interested in it. They're not interested in it. They're not interested in it. Yeah. So they communicate from distances by whistling.
Another aspect of Hadzabe culture is that they don't attach much significance to age. This... The chap here has got a bit of a sense of humour.
What can he tell me about himself? Does he know his age? They don't know. They don't keep a count of their age? Yeah, they don't count age.
Do they have any idea of age? They don't know. Is this lady young or old?
Old, old. Let me ask her, what does she think she is? What age does she think she is?
I don't know. I like that, you know, actually. Next time somebody says to me, how old are you, Zainab, I'm going to say, well, I don't know. I like that. What did you say?
How old are you? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not saying.
I've kept them all chatting long enough for now. This is a hunter-forager tribe, after all. and it's time for the men to go hunting. They go out every day, wearing the baboon skins to make them look and smell like their prey so they can get nearer to them.
I'm giving a little demonstration of this. The Hadzabe men take a great deal of pride in finessing their hunting kit. The tips are dipped in poison to make them more effective in killing animals. Haono, who's been very friendly and accommodating, gave me a quick...
bow and arrow lesson before the hunt. You know what? It's not as easy as it looks.
This is very stiff straight. Keep my arm straight, he's telling me, slightly at an angle, and away I go. Oh, that's not going to get me very far, is it?
It's difficult. It's much harder than it looks. I think you've got a better...
You know how to use it better than I do. He knows better, don't you? Ah, better! Woo!
Thank you. High five. You don't know high five.
As we make our way through the bush, the men keep a lookout for something, anything they can kill. If it rains, they show me how they can go into the hollowed-out trunks of trees to take shelter. Wow, this tree can take a lot of them.
Well, it's not raining, so I think it's time they came out again. The men are not always lucky, and today their luck was out. And although it's the women who gather berries and plants, when it comes to picking the baobab fruit, it's clearly the men who have a head for heights. Are today's Hadzabe the direct descendants of early hunter-gatherers? We can't be sure, but the Hadzabe themselves have always believed that their ancestors are the very same people depicted in prehistoric cave paintings.
But I want to make this clear. The Hadzabe are not an early form of humans. They are a modern community, even if their culture shows a remarkable degree of continuity. with early hunter-gatherers. Let's look at some of the evidence that we humans began in Africa.
It was the Victorian scientist, British biologist, Charles Darwin, who first made the observation that since the African gorilla and chimpanzee are most like us, therefore our common ancestor must have been African. Once Charles Darwin had made the connection, Other scientists, archaeologists and paleontologists began to look for the evidence of evolution. The Leakey family from Kenya, Louis, Mary, their sons Richard and Richard, Richard and Jonathan are all scientists and fossil hunters who've become synonymous with the field of research on evolution. They've dedicated their lives trying to work out the evolutionary chain from gorillas and chimpanzees to humans. Richard Leakey, now in his 70s, is one of the original contributors to UNESCO's General History of Africa, on which this series is based.
It was the Darwin comment that alerted people to different things and in particular... particular, the notion that we evolved worried people, the church particularly. But secondly, the idea that if we had to have evolved, and we did so in Africa, this was an anathema to many people who couldn't believe that the purified Pure white, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired people of the North could possibly have originated from the Dark Continent, and they were utterly wrong.
But all of the major events relating to the story of us... Go back to Africa. We are an African animal, an African species that colonized and recolonized and recolonized the world in different times and in different ways.
But today, no human can say they don't have Africa as a mother country. I want to see the evidence for myself. And so I embark on a guerrilla trail. Gorillas are only found now in a few places in Africa, mainly in the Great Lakes region between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is the volcano's national park in the Burunga Mountains of Rwanda, where around Around 500 gorillas live in family groups, watched over by conservationists who protect them from poaching.
I'm brought here today by my guide called Patience. Let's hope he lives up to his name. It's quite a hike getting to see the gorillas here in northern Rwanda. You've got to walk a considerable distance through lots of mud.
But luckily I've got somebody who's leading the way and trying to show me the least difficult route. But hopefully in a short space of time I'll get to see some gorillas living in the wild. The one I really want to find is Quihonda. who's the leader of the particular family group I'm looking for. Patience.
Not so fast. I need to catch up with you. I can try to make it easy for you. OK, thank you. After walking for nearly an hour, success.
Look, look, look. I can hear you. Thank you.
Not that I'm not moving. When you get this close, it's remarkable to see just how gorillas'movements and antics and expressions are so like us humans. In fact, we now know that the DNA of gorillas is 98% identical to ours.
That means that the vast majority of their body cells are just like humans. Gorillas do not need to drink water. They remain hydrated from eating plants that are very moist.
You see? It's water. The plants they eat contain enough water.
Gorillas are social animals. Like humans, they live in family groups. And there's always one dominant male, the silverback.
In this group, it's Guhonda, who you can see lying there. And you can see the clear strip of silver. Now the male gains that by the age of 12, it's a sign of maturity.
And Guhonda has been the leader of his family for many, many years. But he's now 45 years of age, which means he's very, very old and is probably near the end of his life. So Guhonda has been grooming a successor, one of his sons.
We may now be sure that humans originated in Africa, but what is the evidence that we evolved from apes? Well, this journey of discovery takes us to Sterkfontein, north of Johannesburg in South Africa, where the first evidence of a hominim, a creature somewhere between ape and human, was found. In the decades since Darwin wrote his book, The Descent of Man, scientists like Kenyan Job Kibi have been engaged in putting together a massive jigsaw puzzle of human evolution. My work at Sterkfontein is more of a detective story. Your piece includes information from bones.
And the first major evidence that you have is the bones themselves, the fossils that have been excavated here at Star Quentin. What they found is that there are many different species of ape men, creatures which are neither apes nor humans, but something in between, creatures with names like Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. Professor Francis Thackeray is an expert on South Africa's hominin fossils. The very first fossil of Australopithecus africanus from Africa was this one. This is a replica of the famous Taung child.
Taung is situated near Kimberley in the interior of South Africa. It was discovered in 1924. Even though it's a child, It can be recognized as a hominid. There is the brain case. Here is the front of the face and the lower jaw. We believe it to be two and a half million years old.
There is evidence that this was a biped, a creature that walked on two legs, and it had a small brain. It confirmed in 1925 what Charles Darwin had said. About Africa being the continent on which human ancestors evolved. The most precious fossils are kept in a vault in Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, including the skull of Taung Child.
Well, these are among the most valuable fossils as part of Africa's paleontological heritage. It was probably killed by an eagle that took it up to a cave. How do you know that?
We know that because of damage to the part of the skull. There are little holes there in the eye sockets, which would have been made by the talons of an eagle that carried the Tong child to a nest. Poor thing. Life for our early ancestors was perilous.
Staying up in the trees afforded them some protection from predators. But at some stage hominins began to walk on two legs. One theory holds that as the climate changed, there was less woodland and more grassland, so there was a greater abundance of food on the ground. The realisation that these creatures walked habitually on two legs is important because that became a key characteristic of humans.
Which distinguishes us from apes. It meant that we could have our hands free and use our intelligence to get up to all sorts of things like making tools and hunting with weapons. If you're a large ape and you're walking along on four legs, although you can stand up periodically, your hands cannot carry things any distance.
Your hands are not structured to handle things with precision. Once you become upright habitually, And your hands are free. All sorts of anatomical changes take place in terms of how you use your hands, how you use your shoulder, how you use your elbow.
There's no question that chimps are intelligent. There's no question that porpoises are intelligent. But without free hands, they can't do much about their intelligence.
Scientists believe they can date the point at which our line diverged from other primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. at about 7 million years ago. This started the process which led to us becoming fully upright or bipedal. I think a date of around 7 million years is where to look for our ancestors.
It does seem that the molecular evidence suggests a split from the chimps somewhere around 7. It's not a precise figure, it could be 8, it could be 9 million. But I think at this stage we can say that full bipedalism, which I... for me, is part of the fundamental definition of being human or pre-human. It doesn't come in until between four and a half and five, from what we have seen so far.
As the archaeologists and paleontologists continue their work, more and more discoveries are made which help us fit a small part of the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the evolution of humankind. More accurate methods of dating fossils have been developed that help us to do this. Hominins have been found in other parts of the world, but none is as old as those in Africa. One important and famous discovery was the skeleton of Lucy in Ethiopia in 1974. What was remarkable about her was that archaeologists discovered quite a lot of her skeleton, enough to get a good sense of what she looked like.
Lucy, as she's known to the world, lived about 3.2 million years ago. I've come to the National Museum of Ethiopia in the capital Addis Ababa, where her remains are kept. Hello, hello professor, hi. Nice to see you. Ethiopians call her Dinkanesh, and her actual bones are under lock and key in a special room where the temperature is controlled.
I'm privileged to be allowed to see the real Dinkanesh, or Lucy, with one of Ethiopia's leading paleoanthropologists, Johannes Haile Selassie. Now, she was a hominid, which means she was sort of part ape, part human-like. She had some ape-like features. For example, when we look at the reconstruction of her head, we see that her face... points a little bit forward, unlike modern humans where we have very flat face.
And that's a very primitive trait that she has acquired from an ape-like ancestor. So she was erect, she walked on two legs? She was erect, she was walking on two legs. She was a very tiny woman.
about three feet tall, about a metre. About a metre. Yeah, but she was fully adult.
Her brain size was not larger than an ape's. We're talking about 300, 400 cc of brain capacity, which is within the range of chimpanzees that you see today. So when did brain size get bigger? We have some evidence in terms of when did we start enlarging our brain size and it appears that it started growing. Not as much as what we see in modern humans today, but compared to Lucy's species or whoever descended directly from her, there is a good correlation between the use of stone tools and the incorporation of meat as a major part of their diet.
So I know that some of the oldest stone tools in the world have been found in Ethiopia dating about two and a half million years ago. Would Lucy have used stone tools? With all this early history, human ancestors could have used tools in some way because chimpanzees use tools.
They don't make tools, so some of them do, like they make twigs, they sharpen them and use them to fish for like termites. So these are human ancestors, somehow must have used some kind of tool. Scientists are constantly trying to work out how the various types of hominim are related, in which part of Africa they originated and how and when they migrated.
What is clear is that other lines died out and there was just one, the homogeneous, which led directly to us. Let's look at the line which led to us humans. The best evidence so far takes us back to the East African Rift Valley, where a number of hugely significant archaeological finds have been made. Here in the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, conditions created by volcanic activity made the soil and rock here ideal for finding fossils and stone tools.
The Leakey family spent many years working in the Olduvai Gorge and it was where Richard Leakey's brother Jonathan discovered the first evidence in Africa of the species which was our direct ancestor. So, In 1961, my brother Jonathan discovered a partial skull and a lower jaw that was clearly not Australopithecus or Paranthropus, but it was much more like what you would expect for an early us. It had a larger brain, it had a hand that was capable of much more manipulation of objects, and they called that handyman or homo habilis. So can you categorically say that Homo habilis is the earliest fossil find? of the line that gave rise to modern humans.
I think if we're going to be accurate, I don't think one could say it is indisputable. The majority of scientists studying the origin story recognize Homo habilis at 1.8 million years as probably the best and earliest evidence of a group or a lineage or a line. that ultimately leads to us.
So this is when the evolutionary chain begins to look recognisably human. To put it at its simplest, Richard Leakey identifies these key species in the line that led to us. From the fossils which have been found, there's evidence from 2.1 million years ago of Homo habilis, the handyman so called for his ability to make tools. From around 1.5 million years ago, 1.8 million years ago there was Homo erectus who was more upright and developed more sophisticated tools.
Modern Homo sapiens meaning wise man emerge about 200 000 years ago. Genetically modern humans that is us began to appear at around a hundred thousand years ago. So we've looked at the process of evolution.
how we parted company from gorillas and chimpanzees and became modern homo sapiens. But what about the why? Why is it that humankind evolved in Africa and not elsewhere in the world? Well, it's the climate of Africa thousands of years ago which gives us the answer to that key question. These giraffes are enjoying the lush vegetation of the wide open savannah here in the Serengeti in Tanzania.
Giraffes are of course amongst the most distinctive and easily recognised members of the animal kingdom. And this kind of environment was and still is ideal for supporting animal life. It was this climate and landscape, like the open grassland in the Serengeti, which gave rise to the perfect conditions for the evolution of the great apes, gorillas, chimpanzees and the ape men who developed into humans.
There was then, and still is now, plenty of game for carnivores to hunt. When you're here in the Serengeti, it's clear that the rules of engagement are eat or be eaten. Just about every animal is either on the lookout for something to eat or is watching fearfully to avoid being eaten itself. And early humans were part of that way of life.
It was all about survival. And I think I'm going to get back into the car because I may be coming in between a lion and its dinner. While parts of Africa like the Serengeti are obviously lush and rich in wildlife, others are arid.
But that doesn't mean they were always like that. Over the course of the millennia, the climate changes. For instance, the Sahara desert dried out through time.
Until about 10 to 12,000 years ago, it supported animal and plant life. One of the most striking demonstrations of this is to be found in the Sahara in the north of Sudan. It's hard to imagine that the Sahara Desert in northern Sudan wasn't always like this. I'm at the site of the petrified forest just outside the town of Al-Quru.
where there's clear evidence that there was a lush tropical climate here. There were giant trees. You can see the fossilised tree trunks around me. There was water running through here, and at some stage many millions of years ago, these trees fell into the water.
There was silica in the water, and this, combined with the high temperature, led to a chemical process, whereby the tissues of the tree trunks were replaced by the silica, which was then used to make silica. preserving them for posterity by fossilising them. So where there is now desert, you have to imagine tall forests and grasslands with wild animals.
The art of our ancestors also tells us a great deal about how the climate in some parts of Africa has changed. These paintings in North Africa in Algeria are in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There are thousands of them, like a rock art gallery.
And what is so amazing is that outside the land is barren desert, but inside the caves we see a world teeming with animals just like those which populate the Serengeti today. Experts can't be sure when early humans started to acquire the imagination that led them to creating art. But cognitive complexity had reached the point where imagination was in place more than 3 million years ago.
Though the art we see here probably dates back to around 10,000 BC. Algerian professor Sliman Hachi is an archaeologist specializing in rock art. I meet him in Algiers. Why do you think that early humans in the Stone Age period would want to depict these images?
Is this art a documentary art? Did they paint or engrave it to tell us, here is how we live, here is what we have around us? Certainly yes, but certainly no too.
Certainly yes, of course. that this art documents us, allows us to know with which type of animals these populations lived. But this is not the purpose of this art. This art is a writing, a writing of myths, of mythograms.
These are mythograms that are transcribed by these prehistoricals. Obviously, they describe daily life scenes, don't they? But there are images, there are representations. that we don't understand at first sight, that we don't understand at first sight, and that they want to say something. The study of the origins of humankind leads us to the very important consideration of what it is to be human.
To me, what makes us human is we have... Extraordinary dexterity within our hands. We can use our hands in association with our brain and our eyesight to do all sorts of things.
We have complex cognition and complex brains. I think we have a cognition system that enables us to put ourselves in time, both previous and forward-looking. I think once you can plan something...
Because you can discuss tomorrow as well as experience from yesterday, I think you have a great advantage. I think accessing rich diets was critical to becoming us. I think those are the issues that we're looking for, and one which at the moment seems to defy research of the kind we do, is the origin of speech.
And once you can convey complex messages as opposed to messages, you have an unfathomable advantage of everything else. The difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that it is only humans who use words. We have the power of speech.
The majority of experts in this field believe that it was Homo erectus who first used words, which means our earliest ancestors communicated through speech about one and a half million years ago. I don't know how to speak it. I don't know how to speak it. I don't know how to speak it.
I don't know how to speak it. It's really fascinating. You know the Hadzame speak a click language known as Hadzane.
And it's believed by some experts that since it is similar to click languages spoken by the San people of southern Africa, that therefore there is a link between them and the Hadzabe. and that they possibly share a common ancestor? It's possible that the early language may have been a Greek language. The Hadza and Nkumsani of South Africa are believed to be indigenous people, particularly in Africa, south of the Sahara.
People believe that this early language may have been a Greek language, like that of Hadza today. or even the Khun San of the Kalahari. The Hadzabe have taught us so much about how our early human ancestors survived, lived, how they ordered their societies and their beliefs. Before I take my leave of them, I end my visit on a very enjoyable note. They want to show me one of their special dances, which they perform before a hunt.
Learning about the process of evolution makes you really think about what it is to be human. Dancing, singing, talking, telling stories and jokes, creating art, making things with our hands, having some kind of belief system and spirituality. All these things are part of the makeup of humankind.
And Africa is where it began. We all came out of Africa. The fact that humans around the world are part of the original African diaspora cannot now be argued.
Scientifically, culturally it's still argued. I think the prejudice against Africa and all the... that's gone into their thinking about Africa, probably will take longer to break down, but break it down we must, and we will only break it down not with fairy tales, but with facts.
In the second programme of Africa's History, I'll be looking at how humans became pastoralists and farmers living in settled communities, and at how the Iron Age transformed lives and paved the way for the development of the urban civilisations of Africa.