From the King James Bible, Genesis 1:26
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
If you believe the Bible is the literal Word of God, then you believe, as Columbus did, that Man has the God-given right to rule over nature. This quintessential attitude is what Columbus, his priests, and European seamen brought to the shores of the New World.
When they encountered the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, they were shocked at their shameless nakedness, at the incomprehensible languages they spoke, at their total ignorance of the Bible and Almighty God. It isn’t much of a stretch to see how the Europeans came to view the Natives as being less than fully human: sub-human animals that could be exploited as desired by those of the superior race.
In contrast, the Taino people (the natives that Columbus primarily encountered on the islands) saw themselves as being part of the continuum of life. They didn’t’ stand above nature as Lord and Master. They were part of nature with no more dominion over all creatures than monkeys, sloths, or parrots could claim. This profound difference in core values would shape the clash of worlds that followed with tragic consequences for the native people and for the human race.
21st-century science clearly demonstrates how creatures evolve from creatures over vast expanses of time. We’ve explored the antiquity of the earth, seen the evolution of whales from wolf-like land mammals with a taste for fish, to limbless mammals who set out to sea and became fully aquatic. We’ve also had a look at the common ancestor we share with chimps and the first discovered fossils of the hominin lineage that branched off from our knuckle-walking cousins, Sahelanthropus.
Many excellent books have been written about human evolution, but nobody summarizes it better than Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution is True. “After Sahelanthropus, we have a few six-million-year-old fragments from another species, Orrorin tugenensis, including a single leg bone that has been interpreted as evidence of bipedality. But then there is a two-million-year gap with no substantive hominin fossils… But, beginning about four million years ago, the fossils reappear, and from them we see branches beginning to sprout from the hominin tree. In fact, several species might have lived at the same time. Among these are the ‘gracile’ (slender and graceful) australopithecines, which again show mixtures of apelike and humanlike traits. On the ape side, their brains are roughly chimp-sized, and their skulls are more apelike than humanlike. But the teeth are relatively small and set in rows midway between the rectangular shape of apes and the parabolic palate of humans. And they were definitely bipedal.” (Coyne, 2009)
In 1974, Donald Johanson, an American paleoanthropologist, made an astonishing discovery while on a dig in Ethiopia. He and his crew found hundreds of fossilized fragments of a single, female specimen of a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, that dates back to 3.2 million years. They named her Lucy after the Beatles song they played in celebration of the find, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. She was 3’7” tall, weighed about 64 lbs., and walked on two legs. She would become famous worldwide and hailed as the most important discovery of 20th-century paleoanthropology. (to be continued in the next post).