“Man is more ape than many of the apes.” - Friedrich Nietzsche



Regardless of what you may or may not think you know about human evolution; we definitely did not evolve from apes.

No, I'm not touting the creationist fairytale.


We human beings, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens to be exact, share a common ancestor with apes. This is the elusive 'missing link', whom you've probably heard about before. All we really know about this famous intermediary is that he lived in the Pliocene era, more than five million years ago, and that he descended from squirrel-esque tree-shrew. Who, in turn, evolved from hedgehogs and before that, starfish.

Our closest relative is the chimpanzee and a comparison of our respective genomes shows that we split far more recently than previously thought. This would raise the possibility of interbreeding between early humans and chimps, resulting in a hybrid species which is now extinct. The final separation between the two species occurred just under five and a half million years ago.

Described by Stephen Jay Gould as a "recent African twig on the bushy tree of human evolution", it is most feasible that Homo Sapiens Sapiens indeed has it's roots in Africa. Genetic evidence suggests that the first human population outside Africa were the Andaman islanders. The islands lie off the cost of India and the indigenous population has been isolated for over 60,000 years. Even longer than Australia's aborigines.

Less than 400 Andamanese survive today, divided into two tribes. These tribes are the Jarawa and the Sentinelese. In fact, the hundred or so Sentinelese are so isolated that no-one has ever even studied the language. The other Andamanese languages don't have any known relatives either.

They only have five numbers. Rather, they only really have five 'concepts' of numbers. These are: 'one', 'two', 'one more', 'some more' and 'all'. Nonetheless, they have twelve distinct words to describe the different stages of ripening fruit and two of these are impossible to translate into English.

The Andamanese are one of the only two tribes in the world that cannot make fire. The other are a tribe of African pygmies called the Ake. Instead of making fire, they have developed an elaborate system for keeping and transporting embers in clay pots. These fires have been kept alive for thousands of years, probably having been started by ancient lightening strikes.

As alien as all this sounds, they do share some remarkable similarities with Western civilisation. In particular, their concept of God. Their principle deity's called Puluga. He's invisible, immortal and omnipresent. He's also responsible for creating everything, except evil. He has a big problem with sin but offers great comfort to those in despair. Oh, and he also sent a great flood to punish man's wrongdoing.

Strangely enough, the 2004 tsunami hit the Andaman Islands with it's full force but, as far as recent study has been able to ascertain, left the ancient Andamanese peoples unharmed.