Extracted from the reddish-brown sediment of the Ethiopian desert in the late 20th century, fossil remains – including a partial skeleton nicknamed ‘Ardi’ – show that it shared many characteristics with modern humans but, like a character from a Star Wars movie, differed in fundamental ways. One of the most ancient and best characterised of these prior forms of human existence, Ardipithecus ramidus, is a case in point.
The fact that Homo sapiens was preceded by multiple now-extinct hominid species tells us that evolution has experimented with a number of different ways of being human. One of the most remarkable findings of the Human Genome Project, completed at the beginning of this millennium, was that the human genome contains just 21,000 protein-encoding genes, 10,000 fewer than that of the water flea. The 3 billion or so bases of the human genome are parsed into twenty-three separate chromosomal pairs. The information in genomes is digitally represented in combinatorial sequences of the four chemical bases from which DNA is made. These provide the raw material and substrate for our morphology, behaviour and culture. Whereas in the past philosophers could only speculate about the source of human nature, we now know that the foundations of our humanity lie within the genetic instruction manuals situated in our genomes.
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