The first human-like creature to pick up a pointed stick and use it as a tool to slay another creature changed everything.  Instead of waiting for the accumulation of random genetic variations to impart gradually improving biological tools our creature could create tools itself.

The advantage to humans of being able to organise, teach and use weapons to catch food may initially have been slight.  That marginal advantage has allowed a single species to migrate, settle and dominate their entire planet; something unprecedented in all of Earth history.

This year’s Nelson Mandela Science Lecture will be held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the invited speaker is Professor Chris Stringer, Research leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

His theme is Charles Darwin, Africa, and Human Evolution. Charles Darwin was one of the first to suggest that humans probably had their origins in Africa, but at the time, there was no fossil evidence to support this notion. However, since 1921, there has been a tremendous growth in fossil, archaeological and, most recently genetic, data supporting this idea. Although most experts now accept that Africa was our original evolutionary homeland, there is less agreement about whether it was the only place of origin for our own species Homo sapiens. In this talk Professor Stringer will discuss our African origins and our eventual spread out of the continent to populate the Earth.

The Nelson Mandela Science Lecture is sanctioned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The 2009 lecture is held jointly with the Darwin200 series of lectures, a partnership project of the Africa Genome Education Institute & the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town.

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