examine the available evidence to suggest that east africa is a craddle of man kind?

Question

which evidence is there that confirms east africa as a craddle of man kind

Answer 1

DNA tracings of all the main population groups of the earth lead back to a small group of 2,000 in sub-sahara africa.

Answer 2

As early as 1871, Africa was thought to be the cradle of humankind. In his book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote that Africa was probably where humans evolved, largely because our closest living relatives - gorillas and chimpanzees - all live in Africa today. The idea however, wasn't well received. "Anthropologists disliked Darwin's suggestion intensely, not least because tropical Africa was regarded with colonial disdain: the Dark Continent was not viewed as a fit place for the origin of so noble a creature as Homo sapien," writes paleontologist Richard Leakey, whose famous parents found a wealth of fossils in East Africa and established the area as a vital part of human history.



Java Man
Asia was where most people thought that our early human ancestors and great apes branched from a common ancestor. In fact, the first hominid fossil hunter, a Dutch anatomist named Eugene Dubois went searching for fossils in Indonesia because another close relative, the orangutans, lived there. He was rewarded in 1891 with the discovery of Java Man. It was the first hominid fossil found outside of Europe. At the time, the only known hominid fossils were of Neandertals from Europe, which come from a relatively late stage in human evolution.



Peking Man (left); Taung Baby (right).
Then, in 1927, Canadian Davidson Black discovered what became known as Peking Man, a hominid uncovered in an abandoned limestone quarry near Beijing, China. At about the same time - 50 years after Darwin's hypothesis - came the proof. Raymond Dart, an Australian anatomist discovered Taung Baby, the first African hominid, in a limestone quarry in South Africa.

But it wasn't until the late 1950s and 60s, that people came to accept that Africa was where human evolution began. In 1959, Mary and Louis Leakey discovered Zinjanthropus, a hominid skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Tools had been found there 30 years earlier, and finally the possible toolmaker was revealed. (The Leakeys also discovered Homo habilis there years later. The jury is still out on who made the tools). Since that discovery, thousands of hominid fossils have been uncovered in East Africa. With the advent of radiometric dating techniques, which allowed scientists to accurately date the fossils, Africa finally became widely accepted as the birthplace of our human ancestors.