The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
‘hunter-gatherers’.15 Another controversial study in the same vein was that of Shuster, Miller, Ratan et al.,16 which saw an angry backlash by San communities in Namibia over what they called unethical practices, stereotyping and insulting language, and constructs that also went far beyond the field of expertise of genomics. Yet another study, done by the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Australia, where researchers zoomed into the Kalahari and made some sensational claims in the journal Nature17, also came in for much criticism. The scientific journalist KN Smith18 found the approach taken and the claims made in Nature to be shockingly simplistic and deficient.
The Stanford and Australian studies also must be read with a wealth of other genomic studies showing that southern Africa has the most diverse DNA reading results in the world, which shows admixture and migration to have been a major feature of our past. These researchers should also have done more than pay broad lip service to interdisciplinary studies. In my reading of the paper, the Stanford study takes a position that many other studies have also found, and then simply moves in a direction of inverting the migratory direction from southwest to northeast without a convincing argument.
My own perspective is that multidisciplinary scientific evidence in the region suggests that the past cannot be explained as simply as one narrow place of origin, nor is there one surviving pure ethnic group of people that can represent people of ‘first’ origin in the narrow sense. Our recognition of the San is as a foundation people who have the oldest surviving direct roots to those Homo sapiens sapiens ancestors who survived natural attrition over the last few thousand years.
More importantly, besides there being distinct San communities today, all other African communities also have old San communities as part of their genetic, ancestral and cultural heritage. As such, the San represent the cement that binds us in a strong, uniting pan-African heritage that is greater than ethnic division or ‘race’ constructs. Respect for the San in our South African heritage should be at the centre of our thinking. Marginalisation of and discrimination against San communities is a grave injustice and impedes us all from truly celebrating African unity. For those who disrespect the San peoples, it translates into having no self-respect as Africans.
The other theory that speaks of Homo sapiens originating in South Africa is more noteworthy than the Stanford paper because it goes beyond genetic debates and includes the study of old human deposits of an artistic and symbolic nature. The actual theory arising from the discoveries at Blombos Cave, which is still debated, makes a different point from that which argues that South Africa is the original birthplace of the lineage of human beings today instead of East Africa. This South Africa theory is not about the origins of modern humans of today, but rather about a possible dispersal of different Homo sapiens who had reached South Africa about 100 000 years ago, from another place of origin. It links to theories that there are likely to have been multiple places of origin of different groups of early Homo sapiens, and not just a single one.
The theory arising from the Blombos Cave discoveries19 proceeds from a position which suggests that a small group of early primitive Homo sapiens originating elsewhere were living in an Ice-Age refuge on the South African coast for a period and then about 70 000 years ago migrated fairly quickly to East Africa. It is suggested that in East Africa there was a possible clash with the other Homo sapiens in the region at that time, which could have contributed to the out-of-Africa migration.
The researchers from the University of Huddersfield who, along with colleagues from other universities, developed this theory have made it very clear that there is ‘no suggestion of any direct-line linkage to people in South Africa today’, and that the genetics of today’s descendants of those called ‘Khoi-San’, namely the L-gene mtDNA markers, does not support any connection to these early possible Homo sapiens deposits at Blombos Cave.20 The theory is not in conflict with northeast Africa as the place of origin of the Homo sapiens line of ancestors of the surviving San communities, but rather embraces yet another emergent theory.
This other theory has more substance than counterposing East Africa and South Africa as places of origin, but though gaining traction it is also still far from universally accepted. This is the multiregional theory of the origins of Homo sapiens. While agreeing that Africa is the birthplace of Homo sapiens, it posits that there was a patchwork of highly structured populations of Homo sapiens evolving at different locations in Africa over time. Fossils from sites across Africa that go back 100 000 years further than the northeast African L-gene skull are argued to have remains that could be those of a species linked to Homo sapiens. Alternatively, the fossils may represent a different intermediary species altogether, or a cross-bred link between archaic humans and early Homo sapiens21 preceding the L-0 ancestor of northeast Africa.
My own position is that the northeast Africa story of the emergence of those Homo sapiens from whom the modern Homo sapiens sapiens – our surviving species – descend, is the foundation of human-genome genetic science today, and is still the most solid scientific theory to date.
But it is not exclusive from the multiregional theory, nor the theory that a proto-Homo sapiens intermediary species may have preceded the findings dating back to 194 000 years ago. Indeed, genetic science consistently shows us that the DNA of other hominin species from across Africa can be found alongside the Homo sapiens L-gene mtDNA findings.
The approach I have employed in arriving at my perspective has been to bring aspects of the East African L-gene yardstick and the multiregional theory of origins together in plotting out a much larger area of Africa as containing cradles of humankind – plural.
This is a different perspective that relies on using the available evidence rather than aligning my thoughts with competitive poles in social science thinking about East Africa vs South Africa, or with any notions of ‘firstism’ in explaining human origins. This approach also brings archaeological evidence, paleontological evidence and genetic evidence closer together. It further recognises that a range of human species lived across the region, sometimes with time overlaps, including archaic humans alongside early Homo sapiens with some interbreeding, but that this died out long before the emergence of social groups or communities that fit the full description of modern people, including San communities.
The area to which I refer is plotted from northeast Africa in a large triangle, which I call the Thõathõa Triangle, with its southernmost points in Aranos in Namibia, and Bethel in South Africa. This will be illustrated and elaborated on below. This triangle’s edges are blurred rather than hard, and Morocco in northwest Africa could be an outrider point to the northeast and Blombos an outrider in the southeast. (Some of the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens, dated about 315 000 years ago, have been found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.22) There is no certainty on these finer matters concerning the period between 194 000 years ago and 300 000 years ago, but it is safe to say that this continuing discourse does not greatly impact on the period with which this book deals. Most researchers in the fields of archaelogy, palaeontology and genetics would state today that rigidity has no place in this arena of studies. The approach to be taken requires less of the old-fashioned tree approach – with trunk, branches, roots and leaves representing a human tree – and more of one that sees the past as an interrelated network in time. Homo sapiens is more likely to have evolved within a set of interlinked groups whose interconnectivity changed through time rather than there having been a ‘primacy people’ of any sort,23 and the later migratory habits of humanity were probably occurring then as well. Brutal climatic changes are just one factor that underlines such observations.
Race theories and genetics
Race theories were born out of the social sciences later associated with genetics, namely ethnography and anthropology. These two fields have greatly influenced neocolonial political theories that are still fashionable in some quarters today. Here I would like to sound a caution about the term ‘Khoisan’ and its variants used by some geneticists who fail to observe the proper scientific protocol of using the term ‘Southern African mtDNA’. The same caution should be applied to the use of the term ‘Bantu’ with reference to people instead of to languages. The scientific genetic protocol for the people some refer to as ‘Bantu’ is ‘sub-Saharan African mtDNA’. The terms ‘Khoisan’ and ‘Bantu’ both have a sordid history.
As was mentioned earlier, the term ‘Khoisan’