When Hans Reck went to school, he was born around 1886, he had a dream like all normal people. And his dream was volcanoes. Especially Icelandic. It fascinated him all his life. A beautiful passion that only needs to be deepened. It never occurred to him to start studying the origins of the human race.

In fact, our German even got a doctorate on a subject like Icelandic volcanoes around 1910, then he also started a doctorate, even teaching, until the German state noticed him. And what did the state do when it found out that it had a reputation in this area? Exactly, sent him to the field. where in Africa, where there were only Icelandic volcanoes. It was in 1912.

In fact, he was sent with a team of specialists in various fields to explore the south of a huge colony called German East Africa. This sums up, grosso modo, the territory of the present-day states of Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. And Rek in southern Tanzania has arrived.

Through Tanzania he apparently also found a volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, enough to make his damlaua. It can even be said that he was the first geologist in the world to explore it and provide information about it. The man also joined a team of paleontologists, and lo and behold, they discovered the skeleton of a Brachiosaurus, one of the largest dinosaurs that ever lived, as well as two specimens from the Stegosaurus family. Buuuun!

Back home in Germany, his management was so pleased with his work and performance that they financed a second expedition and reimbursed him. Now he had to follow in the footsteps of the German doctor Wilhelm Kattwinkel, who visited Tanzania in 1911. He returned with a map he had made himself and stories about a mysterious place called Oldovai that contained fossils. Because Rek was young, full of enthusiasm, and had just gotten lucky in his search for fossils, his family thought he was good enough to send back.

It was unpleasant for him to discover that the card was worthless. Then, that there was no place with that name anywhere. Neither the German authorities had heard of him, nor the local Maasai. Do it if you can! After months of searching, Reck sort of figured it out. That Cuttwinkel found the place, but asked what it was called. It is in German, which my relatives did not speak. They thought that the doctor was showing them a plant that grew abundantly here, namely sisal. What should they do now? They told him the name of the plant was “oldupai”, hence the confusion.

However, luck also favors the brave

Just as Reck was preparing to pack up and return to Germany, he knew he had come to the right place. He set to work and in record time collected more than 1,700 fossils of plants and animals. It is only good to give work to those who are at home for many years. But the most interesting is just ahead! As his mission drew to a close, a local laborer began to cry out in despair that he had made a great discovery. And indeed, he found a human femur.

It’s not like he’s ever seen anything like this before. The problem was that this femur was at a sediment level where, according to the ideas of the time, it didn’t really look like a human being. Well, Reck started digging and found the skeleton ready and pulled it out to ship to Germany. Now you can see that right under the human skeleton, at a very short distance, Reck also discovered the remains of a prehistoric elephant of an unknown species. This species was later named Elephas recki. Finally, since only empirical dating methods based on tentative fossils existed at the time, Reck estimated the age of the fossils to be 150,000 years. For comparison, many specialists of that time believed that a person cannot be more than 100,000 years old.

Species of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals were already known in Europe, and the remains of Homo erectus were discovered in Asia for some time

Well, to understand how it was and what impact its discovery had, let’s say that these were the first remains of a prehistoric man found on the territory of Africa. Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals were already known in Europe, and in Asia for some time the remains of Homo erectus were discovered. To come up with Homo sapiens, the oldest of all, and this from Africa, destroys all ideas of that time. In fact, such an idea could not even be invented. Not to mention that in a world saturated with racism, it is not worth talking about the African origin of European whites at all. Please, Darwin and Thomas Huxley did this before, but on a hypothetical level, and they talked about the distant origin of the genus Homo, not at all about some recent origin. The river simply destroyed everything with a fossil that should not have existed.

That’s why no one believed him. All the good people said that human fossils must come from a later burial, and that’s why they appear at such an old level. Unfortunately for him, this actually turned out to be true two decades later. However, until then he was reluctantly seen. So the German authorities sent at least three expeditions to Tanzania to investigate this issue. All in 1914. No one managed to find the right place.

He also returned in 1914, but he did not have time to do much. The world war began, the Germans lost their colonies there in favor of the British, and Olduvai became Olduvai. Reck refused to retreat with the rest of the German troops. He was arrested by the British and released only after the end of the war. Also, being German, he was not even allowed to return to continue his studies. Therefore, he turned to his oldest passion – Icelandic volcanoes.

But look, nothing you do in life goes without an echo. His training ended up in the hands of a young Kenyan of British origin, Louis Leakey. This allowed him to be a stolen mirage of African origin, proposed by Reck, and despite all the advice received from the English scientific world, he decided to investigate the problem. It was nice of him to convince the English to let Hans Reck come with him, much to the man’s delight. It was in 1931.

Literally a few years later, Rek was dying. All his documents, including the skeleton discovered in 1913, were destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War. Left alone, Leakey confronted the entire scientific community, trying to prove the African origin of the human race. And fought with her for about 30 years. Today, all profile guides start with this information. Please, I wouldn’t say it’s proven even today, but no, it’s the most used hypothesis at the moment. Who does it belong to? First of all, to Hans Rek. Then to Louis Leakey.

Bibliography

• Meredith M., 2011, Born in Africa: The Search for the Origins of Human Life, PublicAffairs Editorial, 288 pages.

• Morel V., 1996, Passions of the Ancestors: The Leakey Family and the Search for the Origins of Humanity, ed. Touchstone, 640 pages.