Mother Africa - History Of Africa with Zeinab Badawi [Episode 1]

[0:39]This is the start of a journey, bringing you the history of the African people, from the beginning of time to the modern era. A TV series based on a unique project, put together by UNESCO, known as the General History of Africa. Africa's history, written and told by Africans.

[1:02]Africa has the longest history of anywhere on earth because it is here that humankind originated. In the past, expert opinion was divided about this, but now the debate is closed. This is where it all began for us humans, and it was from Africa that we migrated to other parts of the world. In this program, I'll be following the trail of evidence on human evolution.

[1:46]East Africa's Rift Valley is where we begin. We evolved here over millions of years. Here in Tanzania, the landscape looks much like it would have done at the time of early humans. The contours of the land sculpted by volcanic eruptions. The Ungoro-Ungoro Crater behind me is the world's largest and most complete volcanic crater. Early humans and their ancestors have lived in its ecosystem for more than three million years. It's believed that a hunter-gatherer culture existed with tribes migrating in and out of the area as they have done until recent history.

[2:37]Across this dry river bed, little more than 100 kilometers away from the Ungoro-Ungoro Crater, there exists a group of people who live by hunting and gathering their food from the wild, much as our ancestors did. They are the Hadzabe tribe, and they live on the edge of Lake Eyasi. I need a local guide, David Maragu, to take me because this tribe lives in isolation from modern society, and David has spent many years getting to know them. He's taking me into the bush to meet them. The Hadzabe are unique in that they are the only big game hunters left in the world who live purely from what they kill or find growing wild.

[3:23]They don't keep animals or grow food, and they move around to new hunting grounds every few weeks, building temporary shelter as they go. There are only about a thousand of them in all, and they live in small autonomous communities. This is one of the more accessible groups. I'm keen to meet the Hadzabe because they hold valuable insights and provide many examples of how we humans have lived for most of our history. Muana-bawa. Muana-bawa. Muana. Oh, go, go, go, go, go. Muana.

[3:58]Muana-bawa. They welcome me warmly, and I'm immediately struck by the fact that the group meeting me are all male. The modern clothes, by the way, have been given by charities. They would normally be semi-naked, dressed in covers made from animal skins. And awesome just about sums up how I feel about meeting them.

[5:11]They hunt with bows and arrows, making their own weapons. And they start a fire in the traditional way. They don't have any matches to speed up the process.

[5:35]So, David, now I'm coming to say hello to the ladies. Yes, I'll let you go first. I've forgotten how to say hello already. Muana-aya. Muana-aya. Muana-aya. Muana-aya. Muana-aya.

[5:54]So the men and women stay separately. The women and men sleep together, but are separate during the day because they do different activities.

[6:10]This is Noboko, which in the Hadzabe language means baobab, a fruit that's consumed widely across Africa. The women are so welcoming and don't seem to mind at all that I'm interrupting their craft-making. I want to ask these ladies just how they spend their day. What is a typical day for them?

[6:40]They collect fruit and feed the kids.

[6:46]The women obviously are the gatherers, the foragers. So, what kind of things do they go and forage and gather? What do they eat?

[7:00]They dig roots called 'shumuku'. They get them from the ground, they have a lot of water and nutrition, so they can eat them fresh or cook them.

[7:39]Since their lifestyle is so similar to that of our ancestors, the Hadzabe tribe have been closely studied by academics. Professor Audax Mabula, at Tanzania's National Museum in Dar es Salaam, tells us this is how humans have lived for 99% of our existence. Our earliest ancestors, including early anatomically modern humans or early Homo sapiens sapiens, hunted and foraged. They had natural food, foraging for tubers, digging out tuber roots, foraging for different types of berries, killing animals, killing birds, and that is why the Hadza in particular are known as egalitarian hunter gatherers.

[8:32]They don't store food. Whatever they collect, they consume. And if they kill a big animal, they cannot keep it for more than five days. They consume it immediately, but their food is very, very nutritional. And evidently, it's not fatty like the processed foods many of us consume. In fact, I don't see one overweight adult or child amongst the Hadzabe. As well as foraging, the women search for small mammals and insects.

[9:44]It may not be quite the feast they were hoping for, but nothing is wasted. Noboko gets the lion's share of the roasted mouse. Though she does give a titbit to one child.

[10:06]However, Noboko does take the lead in sharing what the women find with the men. And whatever they forage from the bush supplements what the men are able to provide from hunting. Some of it is cooked to make it tastier and easier to digest. Some experts believe early humans began cooking their food around 1.9 million years ago, when they discovered how to make fire. This meant they didn't have to spend hours and hours a day chewing food, freeing them for other activities.

[10:47]The Hadzabe prefer to live like our ancestors. They've been offered housing and farmland by successive governments in Tanzania, but they choose to maintain their traditional lifestyle. I want to know a bit about these people. Have they, they've been to see modern life, cars, houses?

[11:13]He says: "We've seen the baobab tree, but the car, modern life, never." They're not interested in it. Mobile phones are very popular here in Tanzania. It's a good way of communicating from distances. How do they communicate?

[11:39]They communicate by whistling. Another aspect of Hadzabe culture is that they don't attach much significance to age. This chap here has got a bit of a sense of humor. What can he tell me about himself? Does he know his age? They don't know. They don't keep count of their age. Do they have any idea of age?

[12:05]They don't know.

[12:16]Yeah, I like that, you know, actually, next time somebody asks me, how old are you? I'm gonna say, well, I don't know. I'm not saying.

[12:34]I've kept them all chatting long enough for now. This is a hunter-gatherer tribe, after all, and it's time for the men to go hunting. They go out every day, wearing the baboon skins to make them look and smell like their prey, so they can get nearer to them. I'm given a little demonstration of this.

[12:54]The Hadzabe men take a great deal of pride in finessing their hunting kit. The tips are dipped in poison to make them more effective in killing animals. Hao, who's been very friendly and accommodating, gave me a quick bow and arrow lesson before the hunt. You know what? It's not as easy as it looks. This is very stiff. Straight, keep my arm straight, he's telling me, slightly at an angle, and away I go. Oh, that's not going to get me very far, is it? It's difficult, it's much harder than it looks. I think you've got a better, you know how to use it better than I do. He knows best, don't you?

[13:51]Hi-five. You don't know hi-five.

[14:00]As we make our way through the bush, the men keep a lookout for something, anything they can kill.

[14:10]If it rains, they show me how they can go into the hollowed-out trunks of trees to take shelter. Wow, this tree can take a lot of them. Well, it's not raining, so I think it's time they came out again.

[14:32]The men are not always lucky, and today their luck was out.

[14:39]And although it's the women who gather berries and plants, when it comes to picking the baobab fruit, it's clearly the men who have a head for heights.

[15:07]Are today's Hadzabe the direct descendants of early hunter-gatherers? We can't be sure, but the Hadzabe themselves have always believed that their ancestors are the very same people depicted in prehistoric cave paintings. But I want to make this clear. The Hadzabe are not an early form of humans, they are a modern community, even if their culture shows a remarkable degree of continuity with early hunter-gatherers.

[15:41]Let's look at some of the evidence that we humans began in Africa. It was the Victorian scientist, British biologist Charles Darwin, who first made the observation that since the African gorilla and chimpanzee are most like us, therefore our common ancestor must have been African. Once Charles Darwin had made the connection, other scientists, archaeologists and paleontologists began to look for the evidence of evolution. The Leakey family from Kenya, Louis, Mary, their sons Richard and Jonathan, are all scientists and fossil hunters who've become synonymous with the field of research on evolution. They've dedicated their lives trying to work out the evolutionary chain from gorillas and chimpanzees to humans. Richard Leakey, now in his 70s, is one of the original contributors to UNESCO's General History of Africa on which this series is based. It was the Darwin comment that alerted people to different things and in particular the notion that we evolved, worried people, the church particularly. But secondly, the idea that if we had to have evolved and we did so in Africa, this was an anathema to many people who couldn't believe that the purified pure white, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired people of the north could possibly have originated from the 'Dark Continent', and they were utterly wrong. But all of the major events relating to the story of us, go back to Africa. We are an African animal, an African species that colonized and re-colonized the world at different times and in different ways. But today no human can say that they don't have Africa as their mother country. I want to see the evidence for myself.

[17:41]And so I embark on a gorilla trail.

[17:46]Gorillas are only found now in a few places in Africa, mainly in the Great Lakes region between Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is the Volcanoes National Park in the Birunga Mountains of Rwanda, where around 500 gorillas live in family groups, watched over by conservationists who protect them from poaching. I'm brought here today by my guide called Patience. Let's hope he lives up to his name. It's quite a hike getting to see the gorillas here in northern Rwanda. You've got to walk a considerable distance through lots of mud. Luckily, I've got somebody who's leading the way and trying to show me the least difficult route that hopefully, in a short space of time, I'll get to see some gorillas living in the wild.

[18:49]And when I really want to find is Guhonda, who's the leader of the particular family group I'm looking for.

[19:40]When you get this close, it's remarkable to see just how gorillas' movements and antics and expressions are so like us humans. In fact, we now know that the DNA of gorillas is 98% identical to ours. That means that the vast majority of their body cells are just like humans.

[20:13]You see, it's watery. The plants they eat contain enough water.

[20:29]Gorillas are social animals, like humans. They live in family groups, and there's always one dominant male, the silverback. In this group it's Guhonda, who you can see lying there, and you can see the clear strip of silver fur. Now, the male gains that by the age of 12. It's a sign of maturity, and Guhonda has been the leader of his family for many, many years. But he's now 45 years of age, which means he's very, very old and is probably near the end of his life. So Guhonda has been grooming a successor, one of his sons.

[30:52]The Leakey family spent many years working in the Olduvai Gorge. And it was where Richard Leakey's brother Jonathan discovered the first evidence in Africa of the species which was our direct ancestor. So in 1961, my brother Jonathan discovered a partial skull and a lower jaw that was clearly not Australopithecus or Paranthropus, but it was much more like what you would expect for an early 'us'. It had a larger brain, it had a hand which was capable of much more manipulation of objects, and they called that 'handy man' or Homo Habilis. So can you categorically say that Homo Habilis is the earliest fossil find of the line that gave rise to modern humans? I think if we're going to be accurate, I don't think one could say it is indisputable. The majority of scientists studying the origins story recognise Homo Habilis at 1.8 million years as probably the best and earliest evidence of a group or lineage or a line that ultimately leads to us.

[32:11]So this is when the evolutionary chain begins to look recognisably human. To put it at its simplest, Richard Leakey identifies these key species in the line that led to us. From the fossils which have been found, there's evidence from 2.1 million years ago of Homo Habilis, the handyman, so-called for his ability to make tools. From around 1.8 million years ago, there was Homo Erectus, who was more upright and developed more sophisticated tools. Modern Homo Sapiens, meaning wise man, emerged about 200,000 years ago. Genetically modern humans, that is us, began to appear at around 100,000 years ago. So we've looked at the process of evolution, how we parted company from gorillas and chimpanzees and became modern Homo sapiens. But what about the why? Why is it that humankind evolved in Africa and not elsewhere in the world?

[33:33]Well, it's the climate of Africa thousands of years ago which gives us the answer to that key question. These giraffes are enjoying the lush vegetation of the wide open Savannah here in the Serengeti in Tanzania. Giraffes are, of course, amongst the most distinctive and easily recognised members of the animal kingdom. And this kind of environment was and still is ideal for supporting animal life.

[34:29]When you're here in the Serengeti, it's clear that the rules of engagement are eat or be eaten. Just about every animal is either on the lookout for something to eat or is watching fearfully to avoid being eaten itself. And early humans were part of that way of life. It was all about survival, and I think I'm going to get back into the car because I may be coming in between a lion and its dinner.

[35:49]One of the most striking demonstrations of this is to be found in the Sahara in the north of Sudan. It's hard to imagine that the Sahara Desert in northern Sudan wasn't always like this. I met the site of the petrified forest just outside the town of Al Kurru, where there's clear evidence that there was a lush tropical climate here. There were giant trees. You can see the fossilized tree trunks around me. There was water running through here, and at some stage, many millions of years ago, these trees fell into the water. There was silica in the water, and this combined with the high temperature, led to a chemical process whereby the tissues of the tree trunks were replaced by the silica, preserving them for posterity by fossilizing them.

[36:52]So where there is now desert, you have to imagine tall forests and grasslands with wild animals. The art of our ancestors also tells us a great deal about how the climate in some parts of Africa has changed. These paintings in North Africa, in Algeria, are in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There are thousands of them, like a rock art gallery. And what is so amazing is that outside the land is barren desert, but inside the caves we see a world teeming with animals, just like those which populate the Serengeti today. Experts can't be sure of when early humans started to acquire the imagination that led them to creating art. But cognitive complexity had reached the point where imagination was in place more than three million years ago. Though the art we see here probably dates back to around 10,000 BC. Our Algerian professor, Slimane Hachi, is an archaeologist specializing in rock art. I meet him in Algiers. Why do you think that early humans in the Stone Age period would want to depict these images? Is this art documentary art? Did they paint and carve to tell us: "Here's how we live, here's our environment"? Yes and no.

[38:21]Yes, because this art allows us to find out what sort of animals were living with those people, but this was not the main aim of the art. This art is a written record, a writing of myths transcribed by these prehistoric people. Of course it depicts scenes of day to day life, but there are images and pictures that we can't understand at first sight and they say something. The difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that it is only humans who use words.

[40:24]We have the power of speech. The majority of experts in this field believe that it was Homo Erectus who first used words, which means our earliest ancestors communicated through speech about one and a half million years ago.

[43:34]The fact that humans around the world are part of the original African diaspora cannot now be argued scientifically. Culturally, it's still argued. I think the prejudice against Africa and all that's gone into their thinking about Africa probably will take longer to break down. But break it down we must, and we will only break it down not with fairy tales, but with facts.