The announcement of the Homo naledi hominid fossils by Professor Lee Berger in September 2015 at Maropeng outside Johannesburg dominated the news and headlines for months internationally.
Genetic reSearch continues today, based not.
Many scientists and the general public in the West were slow to accept such a claim.
In 1987, the publication of \'Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution\' suggested that all living humans could tRace their ancestry back to Africa 200,000 years ago.
Yet the Search continues.
The book shows how Prime Minister Jan Smuts supported the Search for Human Origins in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, how the concept of Human evolution was opposed by the apartheid government, and how the post-1994 South African government and President Thabo Mbeki, with encouragement from Phillip Tobias, celebrated the fact that Africa is the Cradle of Humankind.
In addition to /Keri-/Keri, Kuljian introduces us to a range of people who were in the shadows of the well-known scientists.
The book uncovers the sad story of what happened to her remains.
Her body was embalmed and taken to Wits University where her skeleton became part of the Raymond Dart Skeleton Collection.
She died two years later.
One of the people he met and measured was a young woman named /Keri-/Keri.
In 1936, he led a Wits University expedition to the Kalahari to study this imaginary racial type.
He thought that there was a Bushman racial type that might provide a clue to Human evolution.
Reflecting colonial thinking, Raymond Dart followed the practice in the US and Europe of collecting Human remains and characterising Human skeletons into racial types.
Over the past century, the Search for Human Origins has been shaped by the changing social and political context.
Again, few scientists agreed.
Dart believed he had found the missing link between apes and humans.
Raymond Dart wrote in Nature in February 1925 that the Taung Child Skull supported Darwin\'s theory.
What are we looking for after all? Darwin\'s hunch in 1871 was that humans evolved in Africa, but very few European scientists agreed.
Over time, the nature of the Search has shifted and changed.
Christa Kuljian traces the history of South African palaeoanthropology and genetics reSearch in order to make sense of Science and Race in the quest to understand Human origins.
The public reaction to the find indicated a fascination in the Search for Human origins, and that the concept of Race and Human evolution are linked in many people\'s minds.
The announcement of the Homo naledi hominid fossils by Professor Lee Berger in September 2015 at Maropeng outside Johannesburg dominated the news and headlines for months internationally
