Superior

Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity. It was an ideal that went so far as to become enshrined in Australian law. ‘When Australia federated in 1901, when the states came together as a nation, one of the first pieces of legislation to pass through Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the basis of the White Australia policy. It sought to fuse the new nation together with whiteness by excluding non-European migration and attempting to assimilate and, ultimately, to eliminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity,’ explains Billy Griffiths. What happened to Gail Beck’s family was one result of these attempts to remove the colour from Australia, in her case to drain it out of her mother’s line over generations. ‘There was this horrible language of “breeding out the colour” from full-bloods to half-castes to quarter-castes to octoroons,’ Griffiths adds. The goal was to steadily replace one ‘race’ with another.

By the time this state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing was taking place, a crisis had already emerged within scientific circles. Since the Enlightenment, many European thinkers had united around the idea that humankind was one, that we all shared the same common capacities, the same spark of humanity that made it possible for even those of us condemned as ‘miserable’ to improve, with enough encouragement. Even if there was a racial hierarchy, even if there were lesser humans and greater ones, we were all still human. But in the nineteenth century, as Europeans encountered more people in other parts of the world, as they began to see the variety that exists across our species, and failed to ‘improve’ people the way they wanted to, some began to seriously doubt this cherished belief.

The passage of the nineteenth century saw some make an intellectual shift away from the original Enlightenment view of a single humanity with shared origins. Scientists ventured to wonder whether we all really did belong to the same species.

This wasn’t just because of racism. Western scientists had been funnelled into a certain way of thinking about the world partly because of where they happened to be based. In the early days of archaeology, Europe was the reference point for subsequent research elsewhere. Before anyone was sure about humanity’s African origins, human fossils in Europe provided the first data. According to John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York, this created an indexing problem. ‘If you have a series of observations, the first observations guide you more so than the latter ones. And our first observations about human evolution were based on an archaeological record in Europe.’ The first movements out of Africa were eastwards, not westwards. This is why you see elephants in both Africa and Asia. Europe isn’t where humans originated – indeed, being so inhospitable back then, it was one of the last places they migrated to, long after going to Australia. But since Europe was where the first archaeologists happened to live and work, this geographical outpost became the model for thinking about the past.

Some of the very oldest human sites in Europe bear evidence of fairly sophisticated cave art. So as a result of indexing, early archaeologists digging on their doorstep logically assumed that art and the ability to think using symbols and images must be a mark of human modernity, one of the features that make us special. But the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe only around 45,000 years ago. When researchers then excavated far earlier sites in Africa, some as old as 200,000 years, they didn’t always find the same evidence of symbolic thought and representational art. ‘The archaeologists came up with a way to square this,’ says Shea. ‘They said, well, okay, you know these ancient Africans, Asians, they look morphologically modern but they aren’t behaviourally modern. They’re not quite right yet.’ They decided that although such people looked like modern humans, for some reason they didn’t act like them.

Rather than rethinking what it meant to be a modern human – perhaps taking out the requirement that Homo sapiens began making art immediately upon the emergence of our species – the rest of the world’s history became a puzzle to be solved. It’s a misstep that still has repercussions today. If art is what sets our species apart from Neanderthals and others, then at what point did we actually become our species? Was it 45,000 years ago when we see sophisticated cave art in Europe, or 100,000 years ago when, we now know, people used ochre for drawing? And if Neanderthals or other archaic humans turn out to show evidence of symbolic thought and to have made representational art, will we then have to call them modern too? ‘Behavioural modernity is a diagnosis,’ says Shea. All the archaeologists can think to do is ‘rummage around looking for other evidence that will confirm this diagnosis of modernity’.

In the nineteenth century, such uncertainty around what constituted a modern human being was taken a leap further. If people weren’t cultivating the land or living in brick houses, some asked, could they be considered modern? And if they weren’t modern, were they even the same species?

Australia in all its alien strangeness posed a particular challenge to European thinkers. Anderson and Perrin argue that the discovery of the continent helped shatter the Enlightenment belief in human unity. After all, here was a remote place, with its own animals not seen elsewhere, kangaroos and koalas, and with its own plants, flowers and unusual landscape. ‘Based on observations of the uniqueness of Australian flora and fauna’ there were ‘suspicions that the entire continent might have been the product of a separate creation,’ they write. The humans of Australia were thought to be as strange as everything else there.

After the remains subsequently labelled Neanderthal were first identified in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856, Martin Porr and his colleague Jacqueline Matthews have noted, one of the first things anybody did was compare them to indigenous Australians. Five years later, English biologist Thomas Huxley, a champion of the work of Charles Darwin, described the skulls of Australians as being ‘wonderfully near’ those of the ‘degraded type of the Neanderthal’. It was clear what they were insinuating. If any people on earth were going to have something in common with these now-extinct humans, European scientists assumed, it could only be the strange ones they called savages. Who else could it be but the people who were closest to nature, who had never fitted their definition of what a modern human was?

*

We are forever chasing our origins.

When we can’t find what we want in the present, we go back, and back further still, until there at the dawn of time, we imagine we’ve found it. In the gloomy mists of the past, having squeezed ourselves back into the womb of humanity, we take a good look. Here it is, we say with satisfaction. Here is the root of our difference.

Once upon a time, scientists were convinced that Aboriginal Australians were further down the evolutionary ladder than other humans, perhaps closer to Neanderthals. In 2010 it turned out that Europeans are actually likely to have the largest metaphorical drop of Neanderthal blood. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry have a very small but tangible presence of this now-extinct human in our lineage, up to 4 per cent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of humans as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans, too, mated with each other. In the deep past, it seems, they were pretty indiscriminate in their sexual partnerships.

‘We’re more complex than we initially thought,’ explains John Shea. ‘We initially thought there was either a lot of interbreeding or no interbreeding, and the truth is between those goalposts somewhere.’

The discovery had important consequences. It raked up a controversial, somewhat marginalised scientific theory that had been doing the rounds a few decades earlier. In April 1992 an article had been published in Scientific American magazine with the incendiary headline: ‘The Multiregional Evolution of Humans’. The authors were Alan Thorne, a celebrated Australian anthropologist, who died in 2012, and Milford Wolpoff, a cheery American anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, where he still works today. Their hypothesis suggested that there was something deeper to human difference, that perhaps we hadn’t come out of Africa as fully modern humans after all.

Although this notion had been mooted before, for Wolpoff, his ideas became cemented in the seventies. ‘I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked, I travelled and I looked,’ he tells me. ‘And what I noticed was that in different regions, big regions – Europe, China, Australia, that is what I mean by regions, not small places – in different regions, it seemed to me there was a lot of similarity in fossils. They weren’t the same and they all were evolving.’

Wolpoff’s big realisation came in 1981 when he was working with a fossilised skull from Indonesia – one of Australia’s closest neighbours, not far from its north coast – which was dated at roughly a million years and possibly older. A million years is an order of magnitude older than modern humans, hundreds of thousands of years before some of our ancestors first began to migrate out of Africa. It couldn’t possibly be the ancestor of any living person. Yet Wolpoff says he was struck by the similarities he thought he could see between its facial structure and that of modern-day Australians. ‘I had reconstructed a fossil that looked so much like a native Australian to me I almost dropped it,’ he says. ‘I propped it up on my lap with the face staring at me … when I turned it over on its side to get a good look at it, I was really surprised.’

Teaming up with Alan Thorne, who had done related research and shared his interpretation of the past, they came up with the theory that Homo sapiens evolved not only in Africa, but that some of the earlier ancestors of our species spread out of Africa and then independently evolved into modern humans, before mixing and interbreeding with other human groups to create the one single species we recognise today. In their article for Scientific American, which helped catapult their multiregional hypothesis into the mainstream, they wrote, ‘some of the features that distinguish major human groups, such as Asians, Australian Aborigines and Europeans, evolved over a long period, roughly where these people are found today.’

They described these populations as ‘types’, judiciously steering clear of the word ‘race’. ‘A race in biology is a subspecies,’ Wolpoff clarifies when I ask him about it. ‘It’s a part of a species that lives in its own geographic area, that has its own anatomy, its own morphology, and can integrate with other subspecies at the boundaries … There are no subspecies any more. There may have been subspecies in the past – that’s something we argue about. But we do know there are no subspecies now.’

Many academics found Wolpoff and Thorne’s idea unconvincing or offensive, or both. According to historian Billy Griffiths, the multiregional way of thinking about our origins, undercutting the fundamental belief that we are all human and nothing else, has echoes of an earlier intellectual tradition that viewed ‘races’ as separate species. ‘Wherever we are in the world we look at the deep past and these immense spans of time through the lens of our present moment and our biases and what we want,’ he tells me. ‘Archaeology is a discipline that is saturated by colonialism, of course. It can’t entirely escape its colonial roots.’ Multiregionalism, while it was a response to the evidence available at the time, also carried echoes of the politics of colonialism and conquest. ‘That’s the ugly political legacy that dogs the multiregional hypothesis.’

Wolpoff has always been sensitive to the controversy. He faced down plenty of criticism when he and Alan Thorne published their work. ‘We were the enemy,’ he recalls. ‘If we were right, there couldn’t be a single recent origin for humans … They said, you’re talking about the evolution of human races in separate places independently of each other.’

Their theory remains unproven. Academics in the West and in Africa today generally accept that humans became modern in Africa and then adapted to the environments where they happened to move to fairly recently in evolutionary time – and even these are only superficial adaptations such as skin colour, linked directly to survival. But not everyone everywhere agrees. In China, there’s a belief among both the public and leading academics that Chinese ancestry goes back considerably further than the migration out of Africa. One of Wolpoff’s collaborators, palaeontologist Wu Xinzhi at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has argued that fossil evidence supports the notion that Homo sapiens evolved separately in China from earlier human species who were living there more than a million years ago, despite data showing that modern Chinese populations carry about as much of a genetic contribution from modern humans who left Africa as other non-African populations do.

‘There are many people who are not happy with the idea of African origin,’ says Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist based at the University of Oxford who researches human origins. ‘They have co-opted multiregionalism to make a claim that this is a simplistic idea, that races are real, and that people who have come from a particular area have always been there.’ She tells me this appears to be prevalent not only in China, but also in Russia. ‘There is no acceptance that they were ever African.’

While for some an unwillingness to accept African origins may be motivated by racism or nationalism, it isn’t for all. There are those for whom it’s simply a way of squaring old origin stories with modern science. In Australia, for instance, Billy Griffiths tells me, many indigenous people favour the multiregional hypothesis because it sits closer to their own belief that they have been here from the very beginning. Indeed, this is an origin myth shared by cultures in many parts of the world. Until further evidence comes along (and maybe even after it does), the choice of theory may be driven as much by personal motivations as by data. The past can never be completely known, so the classic multiregional hypothesis persists despite its lack of support among experts. It has political power.

While classic multiregionalism seems unlikely to be the story of our past, the fact that we now know our ancestors bred with other kinds of archaic humans does have implications. It gives nourishment to those who would like to resurrect the multiregional hypothesis in full. It’s a factual nugget that feeds fresh speculation about the roots of racial difference. Some dogged supporters of the multiregional hypothesis can rightly claim that at least one prediction made by Wolpoff and Thorne has turned out to be correct. The pair suggested that other now extinct humans such as Neanderthals either evolved into modern humans or interbred with them. And on interbreeding, we now know from genetic evidence, the pair got it right. Some of our ancestors did mate with Neanderthals, although their contribution to people’s DNA today runs to just a few per cent, which means it couldn’t have been particularly widespread. But it did happen.

When I ask Wolpoff if he feels vindicated by this, he laughs. ‘You said vindicated. We said relief!’

Genetics has done the unthinkable, says rock art expert Benjamin Smith. ‘The thing that has worried me is the way that genetics research has moved … We thought that we were basically all the same, whether you’re a bushman in southern Africa, an Aboriginal Australian living in rural Western Australia, or someone like myself who is of European extraction. Everyone was telling us that we were all identical, all the modern science.’ The latest discoveries appear to move the story back a little closer to the nineteenth-century account. ‘This idea that some of us are more interbred with Neanderthals, some of us are more interbred with Denisovans … and Aboriginal Australians had quite a high proportion of Denisovan genetics, for example. That could lead us back to the nasty conclusion that we are all different,’ he warns. ‘I can see how it might be racialised.’

Indeed, when geneticists revealed the Neanderthal connection, personal ancestry testing companies were quick to sell services offering members of the public the opportunity to find out how much Neanderthal ancestry they might have, using data on genetic variants shared by both humans and Neanderthals – presumably in the expectation that this might mean something to everyday people. Maybe those having the test imagined they would have qualities in common with their extinct cousins.

The finding also had a peculiar effect on scientific research. Fairly soon after it was found to be modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals – not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians – the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover. When their remains were first discovered in 1856, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel had suggested naming them ‘Homo stupidus’. But in the twenty-first century, these same Neanderthals, the dictionary definition of simple-minded, loutish, uncivilised thugs, have become oddly rehabilitated.

Svante Pääbo, the director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who spearheaded some of the research that led to the discoveries of ancient interbreeding in the first place, was among those to marshal efforts to compare the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, in the search for what differs as well as what there is in common. This was accompanied by plenty of speculation from others. In 2018 a set of researchers in Switzerland and Germany suggested that Neanderthals actually had quite ‘sophisticated cultural behaviour’, prompting one British archaeologist to wonder out loud whether ‘they were a lot more refined than previously thought’. An archaeologist in Spain claimed that modern humans and Neanderthals must have been ‘cognitively indistinguishable’. A few even raised the possibility that Neanderthals could have been capable of symbolic thought, pointing to freshly discovered cave markings in Spain that appear to predate the arrival of modern humans (the finding has failed to convince rock art expert Benjamin Smith).

‘Neanderthals are romanticised,’ I’m told by John Shea. They’re no longer around, and we don’t have a great deal of evidence about what they were like or how they lived, which means they can be whatever we want them to be. ‘We’re free to project good qualities, things we admire, and the ideal on them.’ In reality, whatever they were like, he says, ‘the interbreeding thing is more like a symbolic thing for us than it is of evolutionary consequence.’

Yet researchers haven’t been able to help themselves looking for evolutionary consequences. One team of scientists claimed that the tiny peppering of Neanderthal DNA may have given Europeans different immune systems from Africans. Another published paper linked Neanderthal DNA to a whole host of human differences, including ‘skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood, and smoking status’. An American research group went so far as to try to link the amount of Neanderthal DNA people have with the shapes of their brains, implying that non-Africans may have some mental differences from Africans as a result of their interbreeding ancestors.

For more than a century the word ‘Neanderthal’ had been synonymous with low intelligence. In the space of a decade, once the genetic link to modern Europeans was suspected and then confirmed, that all changed. In the popular press, there was a flurry of excitement about our hitherto undervalued relatives. Headlines proclaimed that ‘we haven’t been giving Neanderthals enough credit’ (Popular Science), that ‘they were too smart for their own good’ (Telegraph), that ‘humans didn’t outsmart the Neanderthals’ (Washington Post). Meanwhile a piece in the New Yorker whimsically reflected on their apparent everyday similarity to humans, including the finding that they may have suffered from psoriasis. Poor things, they even itched like us. ‘With each new discovery, the distance between them and us seems to narrow,’ wrote the author. In the popular imagination, the family tree had gained a new member.

In January 2017, the New York Times asked: ‘Neanderthals were people, too … Why did science get them so wrong?’ This was indeed the big question. If the definition of ‘people’ had always included archaic humans, then why should Neanderthals so suddenly be accepted as ‘people’ now? And not just accepted, but elevated to the celebrity status of sadly deceased genius cousin? It wasn’t so long ago that scientists had been reluctant to accept the full humanity even of Aboriginal Australians. Gail Beck’s family had been denied their culture, treated in their own nation as unworthy of survival, their children ripped from them to be abused by strangers. In the nineteenth century, they had been lumped together with Neanderthals as evolutionary dead-ends, both destined for extinction. But now that kinship had been established between Europeans and Neanderthals, now we were all people? Now we had found our common ground?

If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of Europeans, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed? Would they have been welcomed warmly with such tight hugs? It’s hard not to see, in the public and scientific acceptance of Neanderthals as ‘people like us’, another manifestation of the Enlightenment habit of casting humanity in the European image. In this case, Neanderthals have been drawn into the circle of humankind by virtue of being just a little related to Europeans – forgetting that a century ago, it was their supposed resemblance to indigenous Australians that helped cast actual living human beings out of the circle.

*

Milford Wolpoff is clear with me that he doesn’t think there is any biological basis to race, that there are no separate races, except as social categories. He comes across as honest and well meaning, and I believe him. But one obvious implication of his multiregional hypothesis is that if different populations became modern in their own way on their own territories, then maybe some became what we today recognise as human sooner than others. ‘A modern human from China looks different than a modern human in Europe, not in the important ways, but in other ways,’ he tells me. ‘So did one become modern earlier than the other one?’ Such a line of thinking opens a door for the politics of today to be projected onto the past, giving rise to racial speculation even if that’s not what he intends.

There is still not enough evidence that any humans became modern outside Africa in the way that classic multiregional theory suggests. Even Wolpoff concedes that Africa must remain at the heart of the story. ‘I will never say that all of modernity is African, but you’ve gotta think that most of it is’ – even if only because in our deep past that’s where most people lived. It is impossible to airbrush Africa out of the lineage of every living person. The genetic evidence we have to date confirms that some version of an ‘Out of Africa’ scenario must have happened.

But over time, the picture inside Africa has changed to incorporate the growing scientific realisation that our origins might have been a little fuzzier than we imagine. In the summer of 2018 Eleanor Scerri at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, together with a large international team of geneticists and anthropologists, published a scientific paper suggesting that rather than humans evolving from a single lineage that can be traced to a single small sub-Saharan African population, perhaps our ancestors were the product of many populations across a far wider area within Africa. These pan-African populations might have been isolated by distance or ecological barriers, and could therefore have been very different from one another. It is multiregionalism, if you like, but within one continent.