The Evolutionary Road essay

The article “The Evolutionary Road” from National Geographic magazine, July 2010, tells our history. It tells about the place in Ethiopia where the bones of our earliest mankind ancestors were found. The story is very fascinating and exciting.
The author of the article Jamie Shreeve writes that the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia is the most occupied place on our planet. As the representatives of human lineage have lived and died there during 6 million years, so now this place is full of bones that are eroding out of the ground there. “Step by step they record how a primitive, small-brained primate evolved to conquer a planet”. And it is the best chance to learn how we became human.
It is mentioned that there are a lot of ways to die in Afar desert of Ethiopia: attack of wild animal, disease, snakebite, falling off a rock, and other. The author pays attention that the life in the whole Africa is very fragile, but there is one interesting fact: “there is an occasional durability of the deceased’s remains”. The scientists are sure that first earthquakes and volcanoes buried the bones, but later they disgorged then to the surface of the Earth. This is still an ongoing process.
The main success of the Middle Awash research project that co-directs with Ethiopian colleagues Berhane Asfaw and Giday WoldeGabriel was the discovery “15 years earlier, of the skeleton of a member of our family that had died 4.4 million years ago at a place called Aramis”. It was announced in October 2009.
The authors of the journey are sure that there is no any other place on the planet than Middla Awash that can show better the development of our history. There are layers that present 15 periods of time that hominids have had: from old, primitive forms to first incarnations of Homo sapiens.
The author Jamie Shreeve tells in the article that he was invited by Tim White, a paleoanthropologist from the University of California, to join their team and go Yardi Lake where they could walk backward through the time. So, Jamie Shreeve came to the field with “two dozen scientists and students and six armed guards”. They supposed to stay on the Lake for 6 weeks.
The part of the article “Herto: The Ancient Familiar” tells how the expedition was exploring the lake margin and found an ideal place for making fossils, as a lot of animals came there to drink and eat and were killed there. Their bones were buried and stopped from decomposition. So, during the first day of their trip they crossed some sand dunes, walked through the land Bouri Peninsula to the village Afar.
During the exploration, a remarkably complete human skull was found. The later analyze showed an age of 160,000 to 154,000 years for that skull. That information was very significant. The comparison of DNA of different people from various regions gives an opportunity to argue that “the ancestry of all modern people could be traced to a population that lived in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago”. The scientists have also found out that Hento people had a taste for mean, especially hippos. It was an important discovery.
According to the facts that scientists got, they came to the conclusion that Herto had a massive size of brains, so he was just as “human” as anyone of human beings today. But there was something important missing behaviorally. Also, there was found a skull of a child, approximately of 6-7 years old.
The article continues, telling about the part of their trip, when the expedition walked to the opposite side of Herto village and came to a new window of time Dakanihylo, or just “Daka”. The sediments of Daka are a million years old. There archeologists found the “complete cranial vault of a member of the species called Homo erectus—but without a face”. Scientists suspected that it could be hyena who chewed off the face of Homo erectus after his death. First Homo erectus was found in Indonesia in 1891 and it is one of the best known ancient hominids. According to the analysis, his sizes of the body and limb proportions were a like with modern people. They had a stone-tool culture.
The next part of the article is called “Hata: A Surprise”, as the scientists found purplish beds that are called Hata. During that part of trip, they traveled 1.5 million years back, to the deeper time window in the Bouri formation. The team of explorers found horse, antelope and some other mammal bones that proved the existence of stone tools 2.5 million years ago; these were the earliest signs of tool use. Tim White exploring the remains of antelope has come to the conclusion that Homo erectuses were not just killing animals using stone tools, but they were also extracting nutrition from big mammal carcasses. The bones that were found by scientists gave more information about who those Homo-likes were.
Jamie Shreeve mentions that everything that was happening to him that time looked like a “paleoanthropologist’s dream scenario”. The bones they found told them that by that time the hominid lineage was divided into two branches. The first branch was of genus Australopithecus, created to eat hard foods. The second branch – hominids with very small teeth and big brain.
One of the chapters called “Aramis: Discovery against All Odds” tells about the trip through the territory of a belligerent Afar clan that is called Alisera. Before going there, the expedition agreed with local authorities and paid for diplomatic visit to their village Adgantole. The next their stop on the walk through time was a 3.4-million-year-old site called Maka. It contained the remains of Australopithecus afarensis. There the scientists made a dreat discovery: they found a complete skeleton of a single individual. It was buried 4.4 million years.
The last chapter of the article is called “Beyond: The Last Common Ancestor” and tells about the memories of the author about the trip to Middle Awash.
The article ends with the words of Tim White: “If you really want to know what something was like, there’s only one way, go out and find it.”
The article “The Evolutionary Road” published in National Geographic magazine on July 2010, tells the history of mankind. The information in the article is very important for the humanity, as it tells about the trip to Ethiopia where the bones of our earliest mankind ancestors were found. The story is really interesting, fascinating and exciting.

References

Shreeve, Jamie. The Evolutionary Road. National Geographic Magazine. July 2010.