By Bryan Cross
Today, our group visited the Cradle of Humankind, which is a historical site and museum highlighting the origins of humanity. It was a fascinating experience to learn more about both the evolutionary development of humans and the relationship between human population and consumption throughout history. Another interesting point of focus was how Africa fits in to the world economy in the past, present, and future.
When we first arrived at the Cradle of Humankind, a few questions were posed to the class as a whole. The one that I learned the most about was: “If Africa is the Cradle of Humankind, how do we explain its underdevelopment?”. Ultimately, it comes down to the unequal distribution of the world’s resources. The wealth disparity that I discussed in my previous blog post is obvious not just in Cape Town, but in Africa as a whole. I found the above question to be very relevant to the Venda group’s focus (economics) and I decided to dedicate this blog post to the history behind it, as well as thinking about how to improve in the future.
The first thing we learned was that humankind originated in Africa. I had learned this before; however, I was surprised to learn that gorillas and apes are not our direct ancestors as I had previously believed. In fact, we have an unknown common ancestor that we share with gorillas and apes. We are related to them but are not direct descendants of them. Early hominids, or human beings, emerged about 7 million years ago in Kenya and Tanzania. Charles Darwin, the famous scientist in the realm of evolutionary history, traveled to South Africa to explore the species there. Initially, he was unimpressed with what he saw. He did not find South Africa to be interesting at all. Another quote at the museum emphasized that scientists like Darwin historically have been skeptical that humankind actually originated from Africa. This reflects a lot of what we have learned about ethnocentrism. This is the process by which the white/western people have a belief that their culture is superior to the black/ African culture, and so their research takes on an inherent bias. Ethnocentrism has been central to a lot of huge issues throughout history, in Africa especially. The same ethnocentrism caused many Europeans and Americans to come to Africa, enslave the people, and completely take advantage of the country’s resources before leaving the natives with next to nothing. This imperialism was not short-lived either. One might argue that it continues to this day to a certain extent. This phenomenon in large part can explain Africa’s underdevelopment. Even in South Africa, where the economy is advanced compared to other developing nations, we observe the highest wealth disparities in the entire world. This issue is deep-rooted and can be traced back many centuries. Solving this issue was a big focus of the museum.
Another related focus of the latter section of the museum was sustainability and how we can conserve resources moving toward the future to sustain humanity. The large issue at hand is that humanity has created technology that makes us more efficient but also more destructive. Thomas Malthus (who was one of Darwin’s main influencer hypothesized many years ago that this would become a huge issue. I think that it already is a huge issue. Because of wealth disparities throughout the world, the rich don’t notice the rapidly increasing population-to-resources ratio. However, the poor end up able to consume less and less as the population grows. Global consumption is increasing at a dangerous rate, and the rich as a whole don’t seem to care or even notice. Urbanization, which is often fueled by conflict and social problems, puts even more of a strain on resources. Food consumption rates are unsustainable in the future. Global ice melt has doubled since 1988. Top soil erosion (as a result of poor farming practices, and makes farming unproductive) is increasing every year. 20% of the world’s woodlands have disappeared since 1700. Greenhouse gases pose a huge danger as well, and sadly are the direct result of human activity. Global consumption of water doubles every 20 years, and over 1 billion people across the world currently suffer water shortages. 800 million people worldwide know what it is like to go to bed hungry.
This issue is extremely concerning. It is fueled by unsustainable levels of consumption. More specifically, it is fueled by economic disparities in which the upper class consumes way more than its fair share and wastes recklessly, leaving the poor with close to nothing. In the words of Nelson Mandela: “The greatest challenge facing our globalized world is to combat and eradicate its disparities”. This issue has arisen before in history- last time it was solved by the Black Plague. Obviously we don’t want that to repeat itself. So how do we solve the issue of the rising population-to-consumption ratio? How do we combat economic disparities and make sure that even the poorest people have, at the very least, enough to survive?
