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Introduction:

Many cultures have stories of where mankind came from. These stories are of a 
mythic and religious nature. Some cultures believe the Earth was sacred and created 
life. The story of Genesis in the Old Testament tells how an almighty god created the 
world and on the sixth day mankind, where after he rested on the seventh day. 
In societies where some have more power and control of production than others 
differences are often explained away by religious or mythic stories. When European 
traders profited on slave trade and white plantation owners in the Americas made 
fortunes on slaves Europeans would explain that people from Africa were not really 
human and therefore deserved nothing better. 
 
When Charles Darwin in the 1800s developed and published the theory of evolution 
he showed that evolution, a natural process, had created the life forms he studied. He 
theorized that human beings must have descended from apelike ancestors that 
descended from other mammals etc. He was heavily criticized by people in power 
that saw this as an affront to Christianity and the story of how God created Adam 
and Eve. 
 
A personal reason for actively promoting this theory that was extremely 
controversial at the time was that Darwin was an ardent opponent on slavery, which 
he saw as ethically wrong and horrible. Abolitionists used his theory, as a proof that 
all races are equal thus deserves to be treated as equals. 
 
For many years a major argument against Darwin was that nobody hadfound a so- 
called &ldquo;missing link&rdquo; &ndash; i.e. a skeleton of a person that was something in between a 
Chimpanzee and a human. But in 1913, the first skeleton was found in Oldovai 
Gorge in Kenya of a person that lived 600,000 years ago. At the time this was 
impossibly old. Since the 1930s, the Leakey family of anthropologist have excavated 
numerous sites in the Olduvai and thereby shown that humans have evolved through 
various stages to become what we are today. 
 
In recent times a second kind of evidence comes from decoding genes (the inherited 
nuclear material of all of cells). People and Chimpanzees they are almost 99% 
identical meaning that we are so close to being Chimpanzees that some scientists 
call humans the &ldquo;Third Chimpanzee&rdquo; (after the two other species the common 
Chimpanzee and the Bonobo). 
 
In 2010, two discoveries were made using genetic decoding. One proved that all 
people outside of Africa have been mixed with the Neanderthals that lived in Europe 
until 25,000 years ago as Europeans and Asians have 4% of their genes in common 
with Neanderthals i.e. genes not found in Africans. The other proved that a third a 
hitherto unknown group of human beings that lived in Central Asia 40,000 years ago 
is slightly related to some peoples in Asia. Thus different types of humans have had 
children together &ndash; and this is only possible because they are part of the same 
species (the definition of a species as that all its males and females can produce 
healthy off spring together). This shows that there is still much to learn about the 
heritage of human beings. Expect that much more will be uncovered about our origin 
in the years to come as new excavations around the world and new technologies 
such as gene technologies are being developed.

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