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Do you want to know more about all this amazing science? Maybe are you interesting in taking one more step in anthropology?

This is your space.

Have you wondered the reason of all the evolution and you need to find more answers? Are you interested in watching others proffesors talking about those things?

This is your space.

A dig for humanity's origins

In this video, Louise Leakey, a member of an anthropologist family, asks “Who are we?”, a big question made over the years.

She starts describing us as upright-walking, big-brained and super-intelligent apes, but she finally says that we are a polluting, wasteful and aggressive species with a few nice things thrown in.

We belong to the family Hominidae, we are the species Homo sapiens sapiens and we are just one species over five and a half thousand mammalian species in the world. We have a common past and a common future with other species like the gorillas or the bonobos, who have had a long and interesting evolutionary journey as ours.

That journey is the one that they want to discover with the fossils they are looking for.

To end up with, she shows her concern about the numbers of people we are reaching to in just 200,000 years, something in what we should put more attention. As her father Dr. Richard Leakey said “We are most certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species”.

So, how many years are we going to survive as a species if we follow this path without changing it?

The search for humnity's roots

Zeresenay Alemseged, an Ethiopian anthropologist, emphasize in the importance of Africa. In the end, we all have come from a long way there, it’s were 90% of our evolutionary process took place and that’s why we find there the earliest evidence for human ancestors, upright walking traces and even the first technologies in the form of stone tools.

Zeresanay was one of the discoverers of Selam, the earliest child ever found. She was buried by a river when she was three years old and luckily, her skeleton has been well conserved. She lived and died 3.3 million years ago.

They ruled that she was a girl based on the size of the teeth. According to sexual dimorphism, males teeth are larger than females ones. As she didn’t have the permanent dentition, by using the CT scanning technology, they went deep into her mouth and saw it clearly. To determinate the age, they estimate the time that would be required to form that amount of teeth. The answer in this case was three.

They were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs, the foot and some features clearly showed that she walked upright, something that is a hallmark in humanity. In particular, she belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as Lucy.

All these scientific information they have found helps us to explore what makes us human. Up to now, the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because baby fossils were missing. They don’t preserve well.

We are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more. So the question is, are we up to the challenge? Can we really do better than these primitive, small brained ancestors?