Dawn of Humanity is two hour program in the Nova series of science documentaries. This show first aired in 2015 and was directed by Graham Townsley. I watch a fair number of science documentaries -- these shows are generally interesting, with high-production values, but not memorable. Dawn of Humanity is an exception -- this program is not only fascinating, but, in some ways, as suspenseful as a murder mystery and, also, curiously uplifting. It's rare to be thrilled by a documentary, particularly one on the subject of hominid paleontology, but this show was gripping and inspirational from beginning to end.
The central narrative in Dawn of Humanity involves the discovery of an almost inaccessible chamber in a cave in South Africa filled with the bones of a hitherto unknown hominid species. The story shows us the first explorers of this chamber, then, focuses on efforts to excavate and retrieve the fossilized remains from the frightening depths of the cave. Along the way, the narrative digresses, although in a meaningful way, to provide other stories and anecdotes that cast light on the central plot. The film's construction seems to be efficient and effortless, but it is clearly a work requiring extensive and ingenious labor to weave all of this information together in a seamless tapestry. The hero of the story is the exceptionally inspiring Lee Berger, a professor of hominid paleontology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannisberg. Berger is a cherubic, smiling outdoorsman, apparently from the United States, a character that we meet ranging the bush with his two handsome fox-brown hounds. (His human sidekick is a formidable-looking Biker, a heavy-set dude wearing a tee-shirt and bandana decorated with images of hominid skulls.) To the northeast of Johannisberg, there is a beautiful, if daunting terrain of mesas and canyons in high chaparral -- the landscape looks like northern New Mexico. This area is called the cradle of humanity because bones, mostly teeth, from Australopithecus hominids have been found in this area. Conventional representations of the evolutionary tree show Australopiths evolving into the first known human species, Homo Habilis (or "Handy Man" -- a toolmaking human-like creature.) The problem is that the transitional epoch between Australopithecus and Homo Habilus is not well understood -- there are so-called "Missing Links." This transition is supposed to have occurred about 1.9 million years ago. After 25 years of mostly fruitless searching, Berger finds the skull of an Australopith in an old limestone quarry -- this triggers an interesting excursus, complete with shots of explosions, about the limestone industry in South Africa and the building of Johannisberg. In fact, a female and child Australopithecus are found in the quarry, their bones broken in such a way that it appears that they fell to their deaths in the shaft of a sinkhole -- the area has a Karst geology. These skeletal remains are the most complete found and allow a reconstruction of the appearance of these small hominids -- the creatures had brains slightly larger than a chimpanzee's, long arms with hands with opposable thumbs and were barrel-chested, walking upright. The show, then, digresses into consideration of the "killer ape" thesis, the theory that mankind evolved from an aggressive predatory meat-eating hominid -- this idea was advanced by Raymond Dart, the original discoverer of Australopithecus and, then, argued most effectively and theatrically by Robert Ardry in African Genesis (and, later, depicted vividly by Stanley Kubrick in 2001, A Space Odyssey). Tartar build-up on the teeth of these hominids can be now analyzed to assess what these creatures ate -- they were not carnivores and seem to have subsisted on fruits, grasses, and grains. (But, in my view, this doesn't dismiss the "killer ape" theory, an account of human origins that is thought to shed an adverse light on "Human Nature", since chimpanzees, which these hominids closely resembled, are themselves highly aggressive, impulsively violent, and wage wars among themselves that often end in cannibal feasting on the defeated chimps.) There are further digressions on racism's effect on hominid paleontology and the rule of toolmaking in human evolution -- tools no loner denote humans any since we know that a wide variety of creatures make and use tools. Then, the primary story returns and is developed -- the exploration of the frighteningly deep and remote chamber in Rising Star Cave. The chamber descent into the chamber is horrifying -- it involves a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet through a tiny jagged slot in the cave's wall; at places, the corkscrew-like and vertical crawlspace is only about seven-inches wide. It takes a slim-bodied contortionist to access the deep chamber and my claustrophobia was triggered just by the images of the descent through that hole. But at the bottom of the pit, the explorers were rewarded by a large open chamber with a soaring, stalactite-studded dome, a place of extraordinary beauty. The floor of the cave is littered with bones. Berger, whose eccentric-looking assistant, has discovered this place knows that there is no way that he could accomplish the writhing descent into the chamber. So he recruits 11 young women, all of them very petite and athletic, and paleontologists to boot. After establishing complex and elaborate communication systems and lighting the deep grotto, the women descend into the pit and began excavating the bones. All of this is intensely exciting and uplifting as well because we sense the young women's real joy and exhilaration at the discoveries that they make on a daily basis. This part of the film climaxes with the retrieval of an incredibly fragile and mostly complete skull from the chamber. At the end of a three-week dig, the results are analyzed -- the bones are those of an upright-walking small-brained creature with human-like mandibles and human hands and feet. The animal is classified as Homo Naledi ("Naledi" = "Rising Star" after the cave), and seems to be the unknown missing link between Homo Habilis and Australopithecus. The creatures in the cave are either very old or very young. There is no obvious ingress to the cave and no way that predators or weather could have deposited the bones in the almost inaccessible pit. And, so, how did they get there? Berger says the he doesn't want to use the word but that the site looks like a..."cemetery." But a "cemetery" of chimp-like early hominids 1.9 million years old?
The film ends with a presentation that the modern view of evolution is that these processes are not akin to a tree with clear lines of descent and ancestry but rather a tangled bush and that various forms of hominids lived at the same time, probably interbreeding as well. Human evolution is not a straight line but the emergence of Homo Sapiens from an extraordinarily tangled thicket of closely related species.
(The film has an epilogue, a couple of titles bringing us to date on Homo Naledi -- 18 individuals have been extracted from the cave. The specimens are not over a million years old as the film asserts in its 2015 version -- rather, the creatures were put in the cave about 300,000 years ago; this is a time when modern Homo Sapiens existed. This makes the tale all the more mind-boggling.)
No comments:
Post a Comment