USA TODAY, March 28, 2001, Wednesday, Pg. 13A
HEADLINE: Tree of life sprouts mankind's destiny
BYLINE: Adam Goodheart

Once again, an old bone has thrown our smug certainties about the past --
and the present and future -- into disarray.

Last week, eminent paleontologist Maeve Leakey announced that she had
unearthed the skull of an entirely new humanlike species that lived in
East Africa more than 3 million years ago alongside the early hominids
previously believed to be modern man's forebears.

Suddenly, anthropologists are a lot less certain about who our ancestors
were, and hence about how we got to be who we are today.

For anyone who thought that such scientific discoveries were supposed to
clarify rather than confuse, Leakey's revelation came as a much-needed
reminder that the world is inevitably more complicated than our theories
about it. The unprepossessing skull of Kenyanthropus platyops -- gray,
dwarfish, flat-faced -- is the latest piece of proof that, as uncertain as
our species' knowledge of its future may be, we know almost as little
about our past. And despite the amazing scientific advances of the past few
decades, including the new use of genetics to trace our common history,
the darkness often only seems to get deeper.

Until the past couple of hundred years, of course, most people -- if they
thought about it at all -- were secure in their belief that humanity began
when God scooped up a handful of dust, or when the Earth mated with the
Sky. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, these old creationist myths
were replaced with a Darwinist story, in which one species evolved neatly and
seamlessly into another, more advanced one, culminating in the finished
perfection of man.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st, it has become clear that the strict
Darvwinist story, too, was a kind of myth, almost as simplistic and
self-congratulatory as the ones it supplanted. But what's next? The old
familiar museum model of hunched-over Australopithecus gradually
straightening his shoulders and emerging as modern man has been thrown out
-- and no one knows quite what should replace it.

If anthropological research can be compared to putting together a jigsaw
puzzle, the newly discovered skull is a piece that doesn't attach anywhere
-- and one whose features suggest that the picture is bigger and more
complex than anyone had guessed. Australopithecus afarensis, the early
hominid most famously represented by the "Lucy" fossil found in Ethiopia
in 1974, was previously assumed to be modern man's direct forerunner. But now
it seems that Kenyanthropus must have roamed the African plains alongside
Australopithecus. Either of the two species might have given rise to
modern humans, while the other withered away, a dead branch on the family tree.
Or they might have interbred. Or a third, still-undiscovered species might be
our true ancestor. As Leakey's discovery shows, almost anything can still
turn up: Homo sapiens has been searching for such fossils for little more
than 100 years of the 100,000 that modern man has existed. Already,
though, it's clear that for most of that time, until the death of the last
Neanderthal about 28,000 years ago, multiple human species shared the
planet -- though whether peacefully or in strife, no one can say.

Nor is it only humanity's remote origins that are shrouded in mystery.
Even some basic facts of our relatively recent past have been reopened to
debate. For instance, it was long accepted that humans reached the New
World about 10,000 years ago, when the ancestors of Native Americans
crossed a land bridge from Siberia.

But in the past few years, archaeologists have uncovered sites dating from
12,000 to 15,000 years ago or more -- in locations as disparate as
Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Chile. And discoveries such as the
notorious Kennewick Man, found in Washington state in 1996, have raised
questions for some scientists about the origins of those early Americans.

All this has an importance that goes far beyond dusty questions of
paleontology. No less for a species than for a person or a family, it's
impossible to understand who we are without understanding where we came
from. "Know thyself" was the famous command of the Delphic oracle in
ancient Greece, but now, 2,500 years later, we know less about ourselves
and our origins, in some respects, than we do about the structure of an
atom or the surface of the moon.

Moreover, recent scientific advances have only made clearer how
interrelated our future is with our past. Genetics has given us a new
blueprint of ourselves, but unless we know when the changes and
alterations happened, or what purpose they originally might have served, that
blueprint will remain only partially decipherable -- and we will tamper with it at
our own peril. Environmental science has shown that our species'
well-being is intimately entwined with the entire planet's, but unless we know how we
connect to the rest of the tree of life, we can hardly trust ourselves to
make the right decisions.

Anthropologist Colin Tudge has written that, given the environmental
issues we face and the slow processes by which change occurs, "we cannot claim to
be taking our species and our planet seriously until we acknowledge that a
million years is a proper unit of political time."

But how can we even think of doing that if we have no idea what our
species was up to even 10,000 years ago, let alone a million?

In our origins lies our destiny: Is man a species fated to rule the world,
or just a clever ape run amok? The news from East Africa should remind us
just how far we have to go before we can begin to answer that question --
and why it's crucial to continue the search.

Washington, D.C., writer Adam Goodheart, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

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