Our ongoing biological and cultural evolution and adaptation has meant success for our species. We have multiplied from perhaps a few thousand australopithecines three million years ago, to arguably hundreds of thousands of archaic humans by 300 000 years ago, to the six billion people alive today globally. As we trace this trajectory and pursue a variety of disciplines in building up a picture of our past as a species, we should always bear in mind that we are working not with the ‘truth’, but with ‘historical truth’.
History has long been sceptical of absolute truth, but not of partial, contingent and incremental truths. This is a ‘working truth’ – subject to transformation; it does not deny the reality of the past itself. It still tries to render a depiction – although usually accepts the unlikeliness of actually achieving this depiction – of ‘how it actually was’, in Ranke’s long-derided phrase. In this field – perhaps more so than in any other historical field – there are new breakthroughs every year, new techniques, new discoveries. Everything we believe could change tomorrow.
People ‘chastened by the feeling that history happened elsewhere’ should remember that Africa was where it all began. As Louis Leakey said: ‘Africa’s first contribution to human progress’ lay in ‘the evolution of man himself’.
