Dr. Henry Gee
speaker
130 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Henry Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yep, that's right. The human history, well, ancient history, has a very, very long run-up. I mean, recorded history is barely 5,000 years, but this one goes into 98% of human history, which has no written record, and we just pick up from fossils and other scraps of information that we can tell from rock.
No, that's the thing about human evolution. The fossils are very uncommon generally, except in certain places. You can count the number of fossils on the fingers of one hand, but the amount of fossils that tell you anything about human origins, you can count on the fingers of one thumb. They are very, very, very tiny, very scarce, mostly teeth like mammals generally.
But the thing is that humans in the very broadest sense, meaning all our ancestry going back to apes, were always very rare in the landscape. I remember going to East Africa to join an expedition looking for fossil humans living 3.3 million years ago.
in kenya and fossils of alligators catfish turtles were just so common that you didn't bother collecting them occasionally you would find you know a little skull of a fossil pig or a bit of a fossil baboon or a bit of an antelope but in the entire field season the number of fossil human remains were little bits of teeth and jaws that you could fit into a a very small biscuit tin
And that was after months of prospecting. And that was a good year. I mean, it's very rare to find a whole skull or even a whole skeleton. I mean, these are red-letter days.
Oh, absolutely, for sure. Not only were there likely to be more, but the thing about fossils is fossils is where you find them. And they tend to be more common in some places than others. So people tend to look in the places where they already know fossils tend to be common. So the caves of South Africa have always had top billing. The Rift Valley of East Africa has been a plentiful source.
And people have been looking in other places and finding new things in Southeast Asia, for example. And there are quite a lot of very mysterious fossils from China. And places like India have hardly been explored because maybe the relevant rocks are not found. West Africa. It looks likely to be a focus of renewed interest. There are all sorts of interesting stone tools.
But one of the problems with West Africa, it is covered in forests, which is very untidy for paleontologists who like to look at deserts where the rocks are more exposed.
So there are all sorts of places that people are beginning to look, and West Africa has some very interesting archaeology, that is their stone tools, going back, and there are beginning to be some surprising results coming out of there.
But the biggest surprises of the past 25 years have been in Southeast Asia, where there are a lot of limestone caves, huge numbers of limestone caves that are barely explored. And there is also... Now we can look at the whole genome, the whole DNA of modern people, but also the whole DNA of some extinct species such as Neanderthals. and another species called the Denisovans.
We know more about these species from their DNA. And also we find some of the DNA is incorporated into the genes of modern people, such as you and me. Neanderthals particularly, I think, looking at me, I probably have more than you do. But there are some species, human species, which are only known... on bits of DNA in the genomes of living people.
It's a bit like identifying Cheshire cats from their smiles. And so there are more. Whether we'll discover more is an open question, but there will be more discoveries. They do tend to happen rather unexpectedly and not very often.
Yes, 10 million years ago. Cast your mind back, if you will, to the earth 10 million years ago. There were more forests on the earth. And we're talking about what we used to call the old world, Eurasia and Africa. And there were a lot of apes. There were quite a few apes in Europe and in Africa and in Asia.
But some of these were probably more closely related to gorillas and orangutans than to humans. But after that period, the forests tend to thin out. Rather, there was a slow... In fact, since then, there's been a generally slow cooling of the Earth towards the Ice Ages.
And in the tropics, the cooling is manifested as forests dying out to be replaced by a more mixed habitat of what you might call savanna or parkland with grasslands and a few trees here and there. And the number of apes diminished, and monkeys became more prevalent. So there were a few apes hanging on. But after about 10, 9 million years, the fossil record of apes almost disappears completely.
And so until the turn of this century, there was essentially no record of apes or humans or possible human relatives between 10 and 5 million years ago. None. None at all. And then suddenly, just after 2000, an entire skull dropped right into the middle. It was about 7 million years ago. And this came from Chad in Central Africa, which hadn't been very well explored.
And it was an entire skull of a creature called Sahelanthropus chadensis. Sahelanthropus. And it's an unbelievably hard place to work. I mean, it really does look like a blasted desert. And people, I've seen people come, I haven't been there, but I have seen people who've come direct to France, because it was a French and Chad joint expedition.
I've seen people come back to France directly from Chad without washing, and they look yellow, they look completely sandblasted. So, but Salampus chalensis was a whole skull, and also there was a couple of elbow joints and a bit of a leg bone that was described later. And these vines, they haven't been directly dated, but there are lots of other animals found there.
And looking at the complexion of the fauna, you can tell that it's about 7 million years old. But the interesting thing about Sahelanthropus is it looks like an ape. The skull's about the same size as a chimpanzee. But the hole in the base of the skull, where the spinal cord goes in,
is right in the middle at the bottom or almost rather than at the back and that's crucial because a skull that balances on the spinal cord that's on the bottom it comes from an animal that's a biped it walks on two legs if the hole that the spinal cord goes in is at the back of the skull that suggests that the animal is like your sheep or your cat or dog I have a sheep skull here.
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