Page 205 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 26

A Species Born in the Earth’s Long Winter

In all that we call ‘history’—everything we clearly remember about
ourselves as a species—humanity has not once come close to total
annihilation. In various regions at various times there have been terrible
natural disasters. But there has not been a single occasion in the past
5000 years when mankind as a whole can be said to have faced
extinction.
Has this always been so? Or is it possible, if we go back far enough,
that we might discover an epoch when our ancestors were nearly wiped
out? It is just such an epoch that seems to be the focus of the great
myths of cataclysm. Scholars normally attribute these myths to the
fantasies of ancient poets. But what if the scholars are wrong? What if
some terrible series of natural catastrophes did reduce our prehistoric
ancestors to a handful of individuals scattered here and there across the
face of the earth, far apart, and out of touch with one another?
We are looking for an epoch that will fit the myths as snugly as the
slipper on Cinderella’s foot. In this search, however, there is obviously no
point in investigating any period prior to the emergence on the planet of
recognizably modern human beings. We’re not interested here in Homo
habilis or Homo erectus or even Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. We’re
interested only in Homo sapiens sapiens, our own species, and we haven’t
been around very long.
Students of early Man disagree to some extent over how long we have
been around. Some researchers, as we shall see, claim that partial human
remains in excess of 100,000 years old may be ‘fully modern’. Others
argue for a reduced antiquity in the range of 35-40,000 years, and yet
others propose a compromise of 50,000 years. But no one knows for
sure. ‘The origin of fully modern humans denoted by the subspecies
name Homo sapiens sapiens remains one of the great puzzles of
palaeoanthropology,’ admits one authority.
1
About three and a half million years of more or less relevant evolution
are indicated in the fossil record. For all practical purposes, that record
starts with a small, bipedal hominid (nicknamed Lucy) whose remains
were discovered in 1974 in the Ethiopian section of East Africa’s Great
Rift Valley. With a brain capacity of 400cc (less than a third of the modern
average) Lucy definitely wasn’t human. But she wasn’t an ape either and
she had some remarkably ‘human-like’ features, notably her upright gait,
and the shape of her pelvis and back teeth. For these and other reasons,

1 Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1984, p. 74.

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