Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History was a National Book Award finalist and won the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Olson has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, and Science. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, where he coaches the math team at a public middle school.

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Mapping Human History

Genes, Race, and Our Common OriginsBy Steve Olson

Mariner Books

Copyright ©2003 Steve Olson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618352104
1
The End of Evolution
The African Origins of Modern Humans

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the
mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the
flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face
of our native land.
— Thabo Mbeki, from a speech delivered upon the adoption of the
constitution of the Republic of South Africa, May 8, 1996

The past autumn has been the rainiest season in southern Africa in
more than a century, and the scrublands of northeastern Botswana are
bursting with life. Hornbills and shrikes glide among the acacia
trees. The bush is rich with flowers and seed. The leopard that lives
in this area, which no one has seen for months, left paw prints last
night a hundred yards from our camp.
About a dozen Bushmen are moving languidly through the
underbrush. They are following the tracks of a small antelope that
passed this way a couple of hours ago, but they are not really
serious about hunting. A young man named Xoma (that"s how he spells
his name in English, though in fact it begins with a complicated
click sound that"s very dif.cult to pronounce) spots a familiar vine.
With a few quick jabs of his digging stick, he unearths a plump tuber
the size of an orange. He hands the prize to a nearby woman, who
stashes it in the leather kaross slung over her shoulder, then
hurries off to join the other men for a smoke.
The lives of these people, who call themselves the Ju/"hoansi
and are also known as the !Kung San, have changed dramatically in
recent decades. Xoma and his family now live in a permanent house
made of wood and tin rather than the thatch huts that the Ju/"hoansi
used to construct when they established a new hunting camp. At school
the Ju/"hoansi children learn the national language of Botswana, not
the complex click-based language their ancestors spoke. They wear
shirts and slacks, not the traditional leather clothes made from the
animals they hunted. Young men of Xoma"s age often leave the bush to
work elsewhere in Botswana or in neighboring South Africa.
But for a few weeks each year, members of Xoma"s village move
back into the bush to live in the old ways. They forage for roots
with weighted digging sticks. They hunt with bows and arrows and cook
the spitted game over crackling fires. They talk and joke for hours
while carving ostrich shell beads or playing an impenetrable game in
which they move stones among indentations scooped from the ground.
Xoma is learning to be a healer. At night, when the Bushmen gather
around the fire to sing and clap the rhythms of ancient songs, he
dances with uncertain steps behind his mentor, learning to achieve
the trance state that will connect him with the spirit world.
Though they are fast becoming part of a cash economy, many of
the Bushmen who live in this part of Botswana still obtain some of
their food by hunting and gathering in the land surrounding their
villages. But disputes with neighboring ranchers and farmers are
common, and the allure of a more modern life is powerful. Whether the
tradition of hunting and gathering will survive for much longer
remains to be seen.
The Bushmen are the original people of southern Africa. (The
equivalent words "Bushmen" and "San" both have derogatory
connotations, but no other terms for this group of people are
available, and many of them prefer "Bushmen" because of its
association with the land.) Their ancestors have lived here for tens
of thousands of years, perhaps for more than 100,000 years. Over that
time the Bushmen developed a way of living in harmony with each other
and with the land. They took what they needed for the present while
ensuring that enough remained for the future. They built elaborate
social networks through marriages, alliances, and trade. They left
many thousands of paintings on rock walls scattered across southern
Africa.
But over the last few millennia, other groups have steadily
encroached on their homelands. Somewhat more than 1,000 years ago,
groups of farmers and herders who were taller and had darker skin
began to push into southern Africa from the north. Gradually the
Bushmen either mixed with the invaders or retreated into less
productive lands. Then, in the 1600s and 1700s, Dutch farmers began
to spread north from the Cape of Good Hope. Although the Bushmen and
their neighbors fought desperately to stop the settlers, gradually
the Europeans prevailed.
Throughout the history of their contact with others, the
Bushmen have been the objects of a virulent racism. Other Africans
have often treated them as vagrants and thieves. (One meaning
of "San" is "untrustworthy.") Many European farmers, on the other
hand, simply decided that the Bushmen were not human. A late-
nineteenth-century tally from German South-West Africa lists the
animals shot by settlers and policemen over the previous year. At the
top of the list, under the heading "mammals," is "female Bushmen:
400."
Denying the humanity of other people has always been a way to
justify oppressing and exterminating them, and science has a long,
sad history of contributing to these atrocities. Well into the
twentieth century, anthropologists were speculating that Africans,
Asians, and Europeans had evolved from different kinds of primates.
The clear implication was that these groups belonged to different
species, one of which was more highly evolved than the others.
But one obvious problem has always plagued this idea. If two
animals belong to different species, they rarely are able to
interbreed. Yet whatever other limitations human beings have, the
inability to interbreed has never been one of them. Southern Africa
today is a genetic hodgepodge of groups descended from the Bushmen
and their pastoral cousins the Khoi Khoi, from neighboring farmers
and herders, and from European and Asian immigrants. The Xhosa, the
group to which Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and many other South
African leaders belong, obviously has some Bushman ancestry.
The "Cape Coloureds" are the descendants of European pioneers, Asian
immigrants, and the indigenous people of southern Africa. Many
European South Africans have African ancestors from the early years
of European settlement, when different groups extensively interbred.
One of the great ironies of the apartheid era in South Africa, when
people were divided into the end of rigid racial categories, is that
few countries have such a rich legacy of genetic mixing.

Anyone who lives in Africa can immediately recognize a group of
Bushmen. They are small and wiry. Their skin color ranges from
reddish brown to almost yellow. Their hair grows in tightly wound
tufts and is so brittle that it naturally breaks off. With prominent
cheekbones and delicate features, they are a handsome people by
today"s standards.
Why are the Bushmen so distinctive in appearance? For that
matter, what makes any group of humans recognizable? What accounts
for the distinguishing features we use to categorize people?
Where the Bushmen live certainly has a big influence on their
appearance. The faces of elderly Bushmen...