by Oscar Tamsen

Modern humanity’s ancestors were reduced to a breeding population of only about 1,300 individuals as a result of a devastating temperature change and bad weather ‘bottleneck’ that brought our original ancestors to the very brink of annihilation and extinction as a species.

This is the conclusion arrived at by up-to-date scientific studies undertaken in various leading academic quarters, including Columbia University in the United States, the University of Milan in Italy, and their associates around the world.

The studies by these scientific institutions found that the last catastrophic events to hit the world 900 million years ago had forced our ancestors to urgently migrate from their original Eden in what is now Africa’s Botswana region.

According to Dr. M. Starr, of the National Academy of Science, this latest scientific discovery relating to the almost tragic history of the original Hominid-turned-San tribal people in Africa confirms previous scientific dating of what was a sudden decline in their relatively small population to an estimated 1,300 souls.

In a published report, Dr Starr points out that this decline in original humankind’s numbers and their resultant migration from Africa are linked to a common denominator — an event known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition in which our Earth underwent a long period of utter turmoil, high temperatures and the wiping out of many other early species.

As I found when I studied the San tribe in Botswana in the 1950’s, the movement of these early humans from their first birthplace caused three small groups of San to travel south, east and north in desperate searches for new food sources and cooler climates.

One group decided to travel south but they found themselves in a never-ending desert — the Kalahari — and, over centuries, they evolved into the famed Bushmen of one of the most arid areas in the world with scant green pastures, restricted drinking water supplies and only self- hunted but scarce wild animal meat for protein.

Meanwhile, a second group moved towards Africa’s eastern coastline. They later became the Zulu and associated indigenous people of South and East Africa, living in the more fertile and cooler savannahs of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Mozambique and South Africa’s Natal Province.

The third and historically most important remaining group of about 800 San decided, however, they should instead migrate out of their devastated homelands by travelling due north up the African continent to the hopefully more temperate Northern Hemisphere.

Over many centuries, this third group of enquiring tribespeople slowly but surely followed the Rift Valley which divides Africa in half and also along what had become an almost totally dry Nile River to the Middle East.

At various points in their desperate travels, this group became split into smaller family lots who at various points decided to cut adrift and settle themselves down. These people are regarded as becoming the nucleus of today’s West African tribes and those who now live in the Middle East.

Still in desperate search for suitable food and shelter from Africa’s burning sun and changed environmental conditions, the remaining travellers were encouraged to continue even further north into Europe and then later to the Near East, Asia and Australia where only a handful of people eventually arrived from New Guinea by way of what is now Malaysia.

According to the National Academy of Science, this widespread surge of early men, women and children from Africa into and across Europe to the East is now more easy to reconstruct and prove as a result of the latest studies.

Scientists also point to the fact that, during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, global ocean levels dropped due to earthquakes, volcanic activity and the movement of landmasses during a time of general global upheaval. This allowed our ancestors from Africa to travel via land bridges between Africa and Europe and from New Guinea into Australia.

The evidence so far gathered by modern academia shows that it was not, in fact, only just one high temperature event but multiple series of geophysical and volcanic disasters that caused the three waves of the original San to leave their African birthplace.

In addition, two further scientific investigations into the original human genome have also linked the time of the first mass migration from Africa to that of the world’s major upheaval 900 million years ago.

This link recently became apparent from detailed research into oxygen isotopes in ocean sediments at various points around the globe. It showed that both the mass migration and the events experienced on earth occurred simultaneously and lasted for a period of time.

All this is regarded by the scientists involved as definite proof that the San were literally burned out of their Eden in Botswana by the desert-making conditions of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition at least 900,000 years ago.

In arriving at their conclusion, the university researchers from Columbia and Milan found that oxygen isotopes trapped in layers of ocean sediment preserve and contain vital evidence of cyclic temperature changes, including those which had so drastically affected ancient Africa to force the San to flee for their lives.

When I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist, I met a Brisbane-born and Queensland University educated anthropologist, Professor Raymond Dart. His studies in Africa provided him with ample evidence that the continent’s original Hominid people living in Botswana at the time of the Great Migration would have faced horrific fiery climate conditions totally depriving them of their food sources and forest habitat.

He considered that the San’s first-of-mankind’s major migrations to prevent extinction had encouraged their evolution over a very long time to take on the characteristics of Homo Sapiens, as science regards we humans today.

Yamba resident and former foreign correspondent Oscar Tamsen whose work around the world from the early 1950s saw him in Colonial Africa for nearly two decades as a working journalist. Oscar’s years in the ‘Dark Continent,’ as it was then known, had him travelling from Cairo to Cape Town, meeting some of the world’s top newsmakers of the time as well as participating in a number of wars and rebellions.