{"id":203424,"date":"2013-11-15T19:24:30","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T13:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=203424"},"modified":"2013-11-15T19:24:30","modified_gmt":"2013-11-15T13:54:30","slug":"where-do-we-come-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/where-do-we-come-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Do We Come From?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_203427\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-203427\" style=\"width: 225px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-203427  \" alt=\"Louise Leakey Paleontologist \" src=\"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/louise.jpg\" width=\"225\" height=\"337\" data-id=\"203427\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-203427\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Louise Leakey| Paleontologist<br \/>Photo: Ishan Tankha<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\nNot too long ago, nearly everyone thought it was the Asian ape that jumped through the evolutionary ring to turn bipedal, thus becoming human. But, no. \u201cAs homo sapiens, we have been around only for 200,000 years,\u201d says Louise Leakey, a paleontologist, on a visit to India to attend THiNK 2013 at Goa. \u201cIf you actually look at how long we have been around as an upright walking ape, which is going back eight million years, our species has been here only this tiny window in time.\u201d And back then, the ancestors of everyone who is human today was negotiating life in Africa.<br \/>\nThat Asia is the native land of all our ancestors is not the only myth the Leakeys \u2014 for she is the third generation of paleontologists \u2014 smashed. They were also the first to suggest that millennia ago, not one but several species of ape were marching up the evolutionary scale, most likely simultaneously, until the early ancestors of today\u2019s humans went into overdrive and shot ahead.<br \/>\nThe passion for searching our remotest past first flared up in her grandfather, Louis Leakey, the son of expat Christian missionaries. Even as a child, all of Louise\u2019s vacations were spent excavating for artefacts and fossils.<br \/>\nBy the time Louis passed away in 1972, his and his wife\u2019s digging had thrown up more new explanations than all previous excavations put together. Louise was only 21 when her father, Richard, also a paleontologist, became an invalid from being in a plane crash. To build on the work of her grandfather and father was the natural course for her.<br \/>\nAnd some toil that has been. \u201cIf you want to become a fossil, you have to die in the right place and your bones have to actually be buried quickly,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is a very rare event indeed that anything is ever fossilised.\u201d But once it happens, the fossils are a revelation. \u201cThere is a lot you can do by looking at the context of these bones, by dating the volcanic ash horizons, between which the fossils are sandwiched,\u201d she says. \u201cIf they\u2019re above a known horizon, they\u2019re younger; if they\u2019re older, they would have fallen below the volcanic ash horizon.\u201d<br \/>\nMore clues are to be had from the sediments in which the fossils are preserved, the fossils of the animals found preserved alongside, the isotopes and the teeth. \u201cThere are many ways to look at the past,\u201d she says. Indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not too long ago, nearly everyone thought it was the Asian ape that jumped through the evolutionary ring to turn bipedal, thus becoming human. But, no. \u201cAs homo sapiens, we have been around only for 200,000 years,\u201d says Louise Leakey, a paleontologist, on a visit to India to attend THiNK 2013 at Goa. \u201cIf you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":203428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7684],"tags":[8626,8986,8987,8988,8989,8990,8991,7685,7686,7687],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}