Spencer Wells – na ścieżkach do jedności

Abstract

Spencer Wells, a disciple of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, carries on his mentor’s works on the reconstruction of the pre-historical global human migration. He argues that all currently living people are descendants of a small African tribe of hunters-gatherers, who lived in Africa about sixty thousand years ago. Homo sapiens left the African plains only 50–80 thousand years ago, and began their slow expansion to all continents, to diversify, generation after generation, into Eskimos, Aborigines, Europeans, Indians and Africans. The aim of his research is creating a map of human migration throughout millenniums. Can all aspects of this line of research be unequivocally determined? It seems that it is too early to claim so. But it may be argued that the crucial cultural dimension, which reaches the core message carried by modern anthropology and sociology, is ridding entirely of the centric attitude and the – promoted to the rank of an evaluative judgment – estimation of the importance of the ethnic-cultural element. Whatever may be of interest here is included in the value created by the community, regardless of its origin, language, or colour of skin.