A mob of journalists hastily approached Tim White on February 9, when he was having a drink on the terrace of a bar in Burgos. The researcher, a living legend of science, did not expect such media attention, despite being responsible for discoveries that have changed the way humanity sees itself. “The cameras approached me, but they passed me by,” he recalls now between laughter. They weren’t going for him, but for another smiling man who was, by chancea few meters further: Pablo Casado, the leader of the Popular Party who, at the time, was seen as the future president of the Government of Spain.
Tim White has spent half a century answering one of humanity’s most fascinating questions: where do we come from? In 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he was one of the paleoanthropologists who announced to the world the discovery of Lucythe remains of a meter-high australopithecus that showed that human ancestors, despite their small brains, already walked upright more than three million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.
White, a 71-year-old Californian, has moved with his family to Burgos, to join as a scientist affiliated with the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH). His resume is stunning. Also in the 1970s, White excavated, together with the famous British anthropologist Mary Leakey, the footprints of Laetoli (Tanzania), presumably left by several australopithecines that walked upright on the ash of a volcano about 3.6 million years ago. And, in 2009, the researcher presented to the world the skeleton of Ardia female of another extinct species found in Ethiopia, Ardipithecus ramiduswhich suggested that human ancestors could already walk upright on the ground 4.4 million years ago, in addition to moving comfortably through the branches of trees thanks to a huge opposable thumb on the foot.
Ardi it was a revolution. The most established theory during the 20th century stated that African apes, similar to chimpanzees, had given rise to australopithecines, which in turn had led to humans. Ardi broke this pattern. It was a creature in transition, with a surprising combination of walker and arboreal. “People expected that the oldest remains would be more and more similar to those of a chimpanzee, but this is not the case,” White recalls.
Tim White is colorblind. “Color is a distraction when you’re looking for fossils,” he explains in a CENIEH room full of bones. The ones he has found on his team contradict the religious accounts of the creation of the human being. One of his colleagues, the American Owen Lovejoy, is now an atheist expert in the evolution of living beings, but as a young man he believed that the Christian God created the human being in his image and likeness. White smiles at the memory. “For people who see intelligent design in fossils, I would suggest talking to orthopedic surgeons about lower backs. And with the millions and millions of people who suffer from back pain and do not agree with the idea that their lower back was intelligently designed”, jokes the researcher. “I only see what the fossil record indicates. You would have to ask a religious person what the hand of God looks like. And that depends on the glass with which you look at it, ”he settles.
The human being still does not know where he comes from. The scientist explains that there is “a black hole” in knowledge around six million years ago, when the branch that ended up giving rise to people separated from the one that would end up in chimpanzees. No fossils are found from that time. The ardipitecos, like Ardi, are the closest to that last common ancestor. “We don’t know what creature humans and chimpanzees evolved from,” acknowledges White, who also he is director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley.
The researcher has been working since 1981 in the middle Awash, an Ethiopian site in the Afar Depression, in the Horn of Africa. There he has lived through famines and civil wars. His team has suffered more than one attack, due to “some misunderstandings” with armed shepherds in the region, without deaths. “Kalashnikov rifles are not very accurate,” says the Californian sarcastically. Geological conditions have made the site like a lasagna in which each layer is a window to a prehistoric era, its depths being more than six million years old.
White’s team found the first bones there. Ardi in 1992, but it took 17 years to complete his study. His scientific adversaries dubbed it “the Manhattan Project of paleoanthropology,” referring to the secret work to make the US atomic bomb in World War II. AND Ardi It was indeed a bomb.
The ardipitheca caused the savannah hypothesis to falter, according to which human ancestors began to walk on two legs as an adaptation to the plains with herbaceous plants, arising from climate change. That bipedal locomotion freed up their hands, which would have immediately facilitated the use of stone tools and brain growth, according to this theory. Those 17 years of study, however, made it possible to reconstruct the environment in which he lived. Ardi. Next to the ardipitheque there was a multitude of fossil woods and the remains of arboreal animals, typical of dense forests, such as the Colobin monkeys. “All the data points in the same direction: it was not a savannah. The theory of the savannah as the origin of bipedal hominids has been tested by Ardipithecus and it has failed,” says White. Ardi It measured about 120 centimeters and weighed about 50 kilos. His hands were free, but his brain was smaller than a chimpanzee’s.
The Californian does not like that label of the Manhattan Project, but he jokes that he is now working on “the Manhattan Project 2″. His team has found fossil remains of modern humans at the Ethiopian site, Homo sapiens, with an antiquity of more than 100,000 years. They have also found numerous stone tools and more human fossils from the immediately preceding stages. White believes the set will illuminate the evolution from small-brained hominins to modern people. And working at the CENIEH, with access to the Atapuerca site in Burgos, will allow him to compare what was happening in Europe with what was happening in Africa at the same time. The evolutionary biologist Leslea Hluskoan international benchmark in the analysis of fossil teeth and White’s wife, also joined CENIEH last year, led by paleoanthropologist María Martinón Torres.
Ethiopia claims to be the cradle of humanity, but also South Africa. The anthropologist Josephine Salmons found there in 1924 the remains of the so-called taung childa 2.5-million-year-old australopithecus whose skull was the first ancient fossil found in Africa. Tanzania it is also considered the origin of everything. Even Morocco, where 300,000-year-old human remains have been found. For White, it is a meaningless competition: “The cradle of humanity is a concept that tourists love, but it is an absurd concept.”
The researcher recalls that finding fossils depends, above all, on whether the ground conditions are adequate to preserve the bones. “In Atapuerca no fossils would be found if there were no holes in the limestone. It’s not that the hominids said: ‘Hey, let’s go live in Atapuerca, there are holes in the limestone.’ No, the hominids were everywhere, but their remains are found there. You cannot take a single place and say that it is the cradle of humanity. It is done out of nationalist pride, mixed with economic interests,” White stresses. “The cradle of Homo sapiens It is the African continent.
“The big question is what was there before Ardipithecus ramidus. Without a fossil record, they are just assumptions”, emphasizes the paleoanthropologist. “The Ardipithecus it is the closest thing we have to that common ancestor that remains to be found. You can take all the oldest known hominid fossils and put them in a shoebox. It’s not enough,” he laments. “I’d love to find something like that, but we’ve looked at our six-million-year levels and it’s not a suitable environment, there are none of these primates. They must be in other parts of Africa, but that place has not yet been found.”
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