A Short History of Nearly Everything

Young Dutch doctor Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois was the first person to actively search out the earliest human remains. He went to the Indies on a hunch, and,surprisingly, found what he was looking for. After working in Sumatra for a year, he found “a section of ancient human cranium now known as the Trinil skullcap. Though only part of a skull, it showed that the owner had had distinctly nonhuman features but a much larger brain than any ape” (436). Dubois called the artifact Anthropithecus erectus, and tried to claim that it was the missing link. Today this artifact is known as Homo erectus, or Java Man.

Around this same time, Raymong Dart, head of anatomy at the University of the Witwaters and, was “sent a small but remarkably complete skull of a child, with an intact face, a lower jaw, and what is known as an endocast—a natural cast of the brain—from a limestone quarry on the edge of the Kalahari Desert at a dusty spot called Taung” (437). Dart recognized that the skull was earlier than Java Man, and placed it at two million years old. Because it appeared remarkably human, Dart named the artifact Homo simiadae, meaning “the man-apes.” However, his discovery was rejected by most authorities because it had been theorized, and widely accepted, that apes and humans had split at least fifteen million years ago in Asia.

After Dart’s discovery, a flood of new artifacts was found. By the 1950s, the number of named hominid types was over a hundred. To introduce some order to these finds, F. Clark Howell proposed “cutting the number of genera to just two—Australopithecus and Homo—and rationalizing many of the species” (439). This order didn’t last. Today, there are over twenty different recognized types of hominid.

Bryson states that for most of history, humans were in the same line as chimpanzees, yet little is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees. However, about seven million years ago, a new species, the australopithecines, emerged from the chimpanzees. The most famous hominid remains in the world belong to a 3.18-year-old australopithecine found in Ethiopia in 1974. The skeleton became known as Lucy, and her founder, Donald Johnson, claimed she was the missing link between ape and human. Although Lucy’s skeleton was only 40 percent intact, scientists hypothesized that she could walk and was a good climber. 

Bryson opens by stating that sometime nearly a million years ago, a hominid first used a tool. It was a teardrop-shaped axe, and soon many other hominids were doing the same thing. In fact, whole societies began doing little else other than making tools. According to Ian Tattersall, “They made them in the thousands. There are some places in Africa where you literally can’t move without stepping on them. It’s strange because they are quite intensive objects to make. It was as if they made them for the sheer pleasure of it” (453). These tools became known as Acheulean tools, after St. Acheul, in northern France, where the first examples were found.

It seemed that Homo sapiens loved these tools, as they were found all over Africa, Europe, and western and central Asia. But what surprised scientists, Bryson notes, is that these tools have never been found in the Far East. In the 1940s, Harvard paleontologist HallumMovius drew what’s now known as the Movius line, a line that runs in a southeasterly direction across Europe and the Middle East. The line clearly demonstrates that only Oldowan tools were used in all southeast Asia and into China. Since Homosapiens traveled far beyond this point, it’s been a mystery as to why they would suddenly abandon their treasured tools.

Another paleontological mystery was discovered when Jim Bowler found human bones in a sand ridge in Australia. Using carbon dating, it was found that the bones were 60,000 years old. However:

This was unexpected to the point of seeming practically impossible. At no time since hominids first arose on Earth has Australia not been an island. Any human beings who arrived there must have come by sea, in large enough numbers to start a breeding population, after crossing sixty miles or more of open water without having any way of knowing that a convenient landfall awaited them (455).

Scientists don’t know how or why they got there, especially considering that scientists previously assumed that people couldn’t even speak 60,000 years ago, let alone build watercraft.

The main theory to explain early human movement has always been that humans dispersed from Eurasia in two waves. The first wave consisted of Homo erectus, who left Africa nearly two million years ago. Then, about a hundred thousand years ago, a smarter species of creature, the Homo sapiens, left in a second wave. Scientists don’t know how Homo sapiens replaced Homo erectus, but they did. In fact, scientists know very little about Homo sapiens in general. Another idea, known as the multiregional theory, believes that only Homo sapiens left Africa, and that Homo erectus is an earlier version of the Homo sapiens. 

Bryson opens by talking about how the dodo bird went extinct at about the same time that Isaac Newton’s Principia was being published. On the connection, he says:

You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it(470).

Bryson uses this as an example of how destructive humans can be on the environment around them. He gives the statistic that “over the last fifty thousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers” (471). In fact, the natural extinction rate throughout biological history has been about one species lost every four years, but human-caused extinction is 120,000 times that level.

Bryson mentions that we know little about what species have existed and then gone extinct. Naturalist Tim Flannery became obsessed with this idea and created A Gap in Nature, a book that catalogs animal extinctions from the last three hundred years—a task that required him to travel the world looking through old drawings, musty specimens, and written descriptions.

Bryson concludes by saying that humans, whether we’re here by luck or Providence, have a responsibility to care for life on Earth. He ends the book by saying, “We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, if to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks” (478).