Hunt For The First Human

Cut marks on bone fossils found on an Indian foothill could well change the narrative on human evolution.

- Siddhartha Mishra With Priyadarshini Sen

Masol, an inconspicuous vil­lage tucked away in the lower reaches of the Shivaliks in Punjab with a smattering of vegetation, has raised a ques­tion fundamental to our exi­stence: where and when did the first member of our species walk on this earth? Is it pos­sible that ‘modern humans’emerged first in Asia, or more precisely, what is present­day India, and not Africa, as is wid­ely believed across the world? And that, too, half­a­million years before the point where the evolutionary timeline is said to have ticked off going by the fossilised evidence in Africa?

Yes, palaeoanthropology might have just run into a watershed moment at Masol. In a discipline rife with claims and counter­claims, where it isn’t always easy to separate scientific findings from their interpretations coloured by concerns non­scientific, the discoveries at this vil­lage near Chandigarh are bound to lead to furious debate. They may well hold the key to some startling possibilities, shake up conventional wisdom on the timeline of our evolution, rewrite the human story and, maybe, even rattle the very foundations of anthropology.