Going Way Back

During the Early and Middle Miocene eras, dating from 20 to 10 million years ago, Africa had a much higher annual rainfall level than today. A single super-rainforest covered most of the continent from shore to shore. A hominoid (primate) ancestor common to all living apes and humans lived in the trees of this super-rainforest.
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The very earliest known representatives of the hominoids have been found only in Africa and were very different from living apes and humans. The oldest finds belong to a group of species in the genus Proconsul. Fossils of Proconsul have been found in Early Miocene deposits 22 million years old in Kenya, and along the rift valley, although it probably originated rather earlier, between 25 and 28 million years ago.
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The appearance of Kenyapithecus between 15 to 11 million years ago marked the point at which some specialisations began to appear. This hominoid also lived exclusively in the rainforests of the rift valley, and showed modifications in the teeth and limb bones, making them more like those of the living great apes.
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Kenyapithecus africanus can be regarded as being part of the combined great ape and human group but cannot be linked directly to any one of the living hominoids.
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Between 7.0 to 5.8 million years ago, hominid transitional species appeared as the ancestors of man and chimpanzee divided. Hominid refers to the family of primates that includes all species on the “human” side of the evolutionary tree after that split. The chimpanzee’s ancestors remained living in the remnants of the great forests, while early hominids placed an increasing reliance on surviving outside the shrinking forests.

Unfortunately, conditions in Africa between around 11 million to 5 million years ago were very detrimental to the preservation of fossils. There are very few finds made from this period, and very little evidence from which to build up an accurate picture of evolutionary events.

Fully modern Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) became established in Africa after descending from Homo heidelbergensis and going through a transitional phase with Homo sapiens idaltu.

In search of new food supplies, Homo sapiens began to cross from Africa into the Middle East. By this Late Pleistocene period, its numbers appear to have been dramatically reduced by a lack of food stocks, perhaps to as low as 2,000 individuals (according to recent genetic research) in the main groups, which meant that for a while Homo sapiens was perilously close to extinction. Other, smaller groups seem to have remained in Africa.

By a strange twist of fate, the harsh conditions that caused this near extinction may also have allowed the cultural explosion that gave rise to human behaviour as we know it today. Professor David Goldstein, a molecular biologist at UCL in London, has uncovered evidence to back up the idea of a very ancient population bottleneck. A bottleneck is an event that reduces the genetic difference, or diversity, in a population of animals. One way this can occur is through a catastrophe that wipes out a large proportion of a population.

If we compare the genes of modern people from all over the world, they are remarkably similar, suggesting that the ancestors of all living people expanded from a small population that survived a bottleneck. ~ The genetic data puts the likely date for this event at just before 100,000 years ago.

After miners unearthed a skull and bones in a Neander Valley cave in Germany in 1856-three years before the publication of On the Origin of Species-the remains were initially described as either those of a “brutish” race or of someone disfigured by disease.

As Darwinian evolution caught on, so did the realization that these fossils were evidence of an earlier human species. Scientists have been debating Neanderthal’s place in human evolution ever since.

It seems that the very features that made Neanderthal perfectly adapted to the rigours of the Ice Age had also locked him into an evolutionary dead end. Homo sapiens may not have been adapted to the cold, but they were tailor made for the open plains. They were better able to exploit the open spaces, the step land habitats that were expanding in Ice Age Europe. And as the forest retreated, the Neanderthals retreated along with them.
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A new wave of Homo sapiens crossed the frozen Baring Straits – Beringia – and entered the Americas. This species was now the most successful ever, having colonised and thrived on all six habitable continents and out-competed all related Homo species.

Can the Bible be believed? Can it be proved? We live in a scientific age, so people often ask scientists and archaeologists that question instead of priests. It’s not always an easy combination of subjects. If someone believes in the Bible, and is also an archaeologist, people just think they are being preached to straight away when they are told something like “I’ve found a wall from the time of King Solomon.” It can be a hopeless situation. In actual fact, it’s very important to compare scientific history with the Bible. It can help us understand something of the motives and methods of the ancient people who wrote it. That’s important because their ancient words have such an effect on us still.
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The problem is not whether the Bible is accurate, but how the Bible is accurate. The Bible is not an economic or political history of the ancient world. What it is, is a history of belief, and of how that belief led this conglomeration of twelve tribes in their faith to conquer for themselves a new homeland. Modern archaeology is now managing to dig up the evidence of the circumstances of that history.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE / EAST FRANCIA
AD 800 – 1806

Created by the Western Frankish domination of most of Europe under Charlemagne. The region was known as East Francia even as late as 1493, when Maximilian I made the formal claim that it was now Germania.