Science-Indigenous collaboration on the story of human history
Our understanding of human evolution could get a whole lot more sophisticated with the unveiling of a new research centre in Brisbane.
The Research Centre of Human Evolution opens at Griffith University on July 8 and its researchers hope to fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of human migration from Africa to Australia and South-East Asia.
It’s a story tens of thousands of years old and is so complex it needs help from scientists of several different disciplines as well as the guidance of Indigenous people to help piece it together.
The Director of the centre Professor Rainer Grun says their research will focus on Australia and southeast Asia and will combine archaeology, genetics and geochemistry.
“In Australia we’re particularly interested in looking at DNA research and languages and how it integrates with archaeology and also re-dating much of the science,” he said.
“But for us it’s really important that we do that in the full collaboration with the Aboriginal elders and the meeting today is really to continue this dialogue and put it on a new level where we’re all free to tell each other openly what is required to work together.”
A 50 000-year journey
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for some 50 000 years and while scientists have been able to construct some pretty convincing narratives for how they got here, they’re still not entirely sure what happened to them on their 11 000-odd km journey.
Professor Chris Stringer has been studying ancient human remains for over 40 years and is now Research Leader in Human Origins at the London Natural History Museum.
He says the theories, once quite simple, have gotten much more complex in recent years as new fossil and DNA evidence has been uncovered.
“We now know from certainly the last ten years of research particularly with the genetic data that this simple story of modern humans evolving in Africa and coming out and replacing everyone else that it’s actually more complicated than that,” he said.
“We had interbreeding with these other so-called species from outside of Africa and even with modern human evolution we see that—with the advent of DNA work—the simple story we have for modern human evolution is much more complicated.
“So it’s a really interesting and exciting time and this centre here if it can give us a window on what was going on in this region I’m sure as with the story in Europe and in Africa we’ll see quite a complicated picture emerging and a really interesting one.”
It’s a picture many Aboriginal Australians are quite interested in seeing more clearly as well.
Professor Grun says scientists researching ancient human remains have to remember whose history they are prying into.
“We have to really say clearly as western scientists, this Australian history is not our history,” he said.
“They are really keen to see how far they go back, they are probably from the population that originally left Africa whereas Europeans did it far later so we are far more recent Africans than the Australian populations are.”
“I think it’s important if you want to tell the narrative of Australia’s complete history it started 50-60 000 years ago and we have to contribute to the history of the Aboriginal people, it’s not our history as old white scientists but we can help them understand it.”
Re-writing the story
This history is intercut with visitations from and encounters with mysterious human populations like the Denisovans, whose only known remains were found in a Siberian cave six years ago, but whose DNA has been found in the blood of modern Aboriginal Australians.
Even more mysterious is a potential side story involving the so-called ‘hobbit’ people on the island of Flores in Indonesia who may well have lived there for a million years.
Standing at just over a metre tall and displaying characteristics like small brains and a lack of chins, Homo Floresiensis have led scientists to debate whether they were modern humans at all.
Professor Eske Willerslev is a Genetics Researcher at Universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge is a world leader in the field of ancient human DNA research.
“[With DNA] you can uncover lost diversity right, you can see what some would call other species—I think it’s questionable whether there’s another species if they can interbreed and get children—but even with modern humans we find evidence in the past of modern human populations that don’t exist here today, they also in some cases didn’t leave any descendants as far as we know.”
“It’s a really really interesting time and it’s a time as Chris said where we, you can say are, to a large extent, re-writing or at least adding really important bits to human evolution and our own story as a species.”