ABSTRACT
It all began in Africa, for all of us. Many years of careful investigation by many researchers have shown that the remote origins of humanity can be traced only in the African continent. It has also been demonstrated that the genus Homo, to which we belong, emerged there at a much later time, and there is a strong likelihood that Homo sapiens, fully modern people like ourselves, also originated in Africa even later. Thus the three most important developments in the history of the world’s most successful species took place in Africa. As one leading authority has remarked: we are all Africans under our skin. However, the African past has often been overlooked by historians, who have tended to concentrate on other parts of the world. Mainly, this has been because Africa’s past has been largely a forgotten past, that has had to be painstakingly reconstructed because of a lack of written records in many areas until recent centuries. This reconstruction has been quite a late development, within the last 100 years and much of it within only the last 50 years. It has been based on evidence from a variety of sources, including the material remains of past human behaviour that archaeologists investigate and the remembered traditions of many African peoples. For the earliest periods, however, it is palaeontology, the study of fossil animal remains, and genetics, the study of inherited characteristics, that have been most important. They have provided the basic biological information that, together with the archaeological data, enable us to piece together the story of our origins, in Africa.
