Handbook

Discussions about humanity's origins pre-date the realisation that material traces of the deep past, in the form of artefacts and fossils, actually exist. During the nineteenth century, the ideas of the Enlightenment scholars, and their Ancient Greek and Roman predecessors, collided with the scientific study of our origins. This subject explores how stories about our origins are written, focusing on how we reconcile intuitively plausible accounts of our past with the rigours of scientific methodology. Three major events in the human journey are studied: the origin of Homo erectus approximately 2 million years ago, the Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe, and origin of modern humans and their complex material culture.