We Spaniards have a somewhat reluctant attitude in recognizing the benefits generated by scientific culture. From the already classic “Let others invent”, to the incredulity of the average citizen who asks himself and asks us: “… and what is it that you do, what is it for?”. Collectively, we are not very clear about the need to invest in basic research.
With funds from the Explora Ciencia call for proposals from the Ministry dedicated to promoting science in Spain, whose initials mutate faster than mitochondrial DNA, we have started a research project in the heart of the rain forests of central Africa, in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. From here our thanks to the Equatoguinean scientific-technical institutions for their essential logistical help.
We seek to answer the question of what was the original ecosystem where bipedal locomotion emerged, the quintessential human trait. We want to know where and how the transformation of apes that gradually gave up life in the trees and began to walk on the ground using only their legs took place. Was Darwin right when he predicted that the remains of our prehuman ancestors should be found in regions where the great African apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees live today?
Paradoxically, all the fossil documentation on the evolution of hominins prior to two million years ago comes from eastern and southern Africa, and we know almost nothing about what happened to the apes and humans that inhabited the rain forests of the Congo and the Gulf of Guinea in the last million years. The unexplored nature of these areas, together with the improbable conservation of organic remains in the soils of these forests, has resulted in the almost total absence of paleontological records. Therefore, any archaeo-paleontological record that we could find in these areas will represent a considerable advance in our knowledge of human evolution. This is where our project fits. Following the Socratic mandate of “know yourself”, new evidence would help us in the company of knowing how we have traveled this long evolutionary path dotted with complex processes, local extinctions, adaptations, genetic drift and hybridization between species. In short, it would serve to learn more about human nature.
Was Darwin right when he predicted that the remains of our pre-human ancestors should be found in regions where the great African apes, gorillas and chimpanzees live today?
And beyond all that, discovering prehistoric bones in the heart of the equatorial jungles and their subsequent analysis would help us generate knowledge in that wide and interconnected framework that we call culture. In the tension of economic interest between the material and the cultural, history reveals a simple equation: the greater knowledge, the greater well-being and therefore greater longevity. Simply because some understood that ignorance and cultural prejudices, the ties of the soul, impoverish and shorten life without us noticing. But in addition, history also provides us with clear examples of the possible material benefits generated by basic paleontological research.
Let’s take an example. For decades, discovering new Neanderthal remains could be considered a playful act devoid of any material utility. Years later, the advancement of molecular biology put in the minds of some visionaries the possibility of extracting DNA from those bones, the same ones that in the eyes of some were useless. Today we know that current human beings hybridized with archaic human species (discovered only thanks to paleontological research) and that those species that are now extinct transferred some of their genes to us; A good part of the readers of these lines have 2% Neanderthal DNA in their chromosomes. Well, possibly a playful acquaintance. But it turns out that these genes also affect our lives, are expressed in our body and determine part of our biology and pathology. There is already a whole branch of biomedical science that is shedding light on how the inheritance of those fossils determines our state of health. A derivative of paleontology…
From a short-term utilitarianism it is possible that research on fossils has little value. However, thanks to them we face the depth of geological time and the time scales on which history unfolds. Ultimately, the reality in which we live, our evolutionary being, is nothing but a mosaic of overlapping realities, each one coming from a different time. The fossil bones lost in the jungles serve the purpose of composing the mosaic of what we are.
Anthony Roses He is director of the Paleoanthropology Group at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC.