ABSTRACT
In Western educational literature people are made aware of the evolution of early hominins in the Eastern Hemisphere within the continent now known as Africa. Discussions that would lead people to question human evolution in broader frames of other possibilities, have remained buried in a few academic papers and the occasional textbook. Western constructs of human evolution are often framed in epistemologies of agnotology. That is, knowledge is constrained through what is not taught. To gain an understanding of the human past it is necessary to discuss the evolution of humanity’s earliest primate ancestors on a global scale. I discuss the earliest reported primate ancestors, recent discoveries of new fossil hominins, human migrations to the Western Hemisphere (the Americas), and the impacts of political control of the human past. I argue that primate and human evolutionary histories have been underreported and silenced in educational literature due to national and historical dimensions of politicised knowledge production. The power of the past as it is created in the present, has a history of producing ignorance rather than knowledge. Discussions of human evolution, as they have traditionally been taught, are often framed through colonialism and epistemologies of agnotology.
