For many Americans, an image of the founding fathers points toward an older, light-skinned man, maybe George Washington, or the signers of the Declaration of Independence such as Sam Adams. That same image may be of a man wearing a powdered wig. Those particular founding fathers helped establish the ground rules in the new governmental and social experiment in the U.S. Their problems with head lice were a reason they might have worn wigs while making up those rules (a shaved head and powdered wig placed on top of it is an enemy of the head louse.)
But who were the founding fathers of our species, Homo sapiens? What did they look like, and did they require wigs? Emerging out of Africa, between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, the founding fathers of our species evolved. These were melanized (dark-skinned) men living as hunter-gatherers. They were likely mobile, primarily monogamous/slightly polygynous, and the fathers may have provided resources, protection, and a caring touch to their offspring. About 60,000 years ago, a small population left Africa and populated other areas of world. They traveled efficiently east to Australia/New Guinea by 45,000 years ago, a bit later moved north into Asia, by 30,000 or so years ago reached Japan, and arrived in the Americas by at least 15,000 or so years ago. Along the way, they established founding fathers for each of these major regions of the world. Also as they spread out, some evolved lighter skin, independently in western Europe and east Asia, in turn changing the complexion of many people’s fathers.
Deciding who is a founding father is, essentially, an arbitrary scientific exercise. But it’s also an exercise loaded in meaning and social value. Many Mongolians might proudly point to Genghis Khan and other immediate kin as founding fathers. Genetic data indicate many Scots trace their paternal heritage to Somerled, who helped fight off Vikings around 900 years ago, though he was of Norse blood himself. A totemic ancestor can anchor a sense of past and social integration. People with last names such as Anderson or Johnson reveal that at some point in their paternal past there was an ancestral Andrew or John who had a son.
But let’s push deeper rather than more recently into the past. Who were the predecessors of our species? These were Homo heidelbergensis (or what others call archaic Homo sapiens) in Africa. Who were the founding fathers of our genus, Homo? Homo is Latin for human, an indication that members of our genus (such as Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis) were more like us than other so-called hominins. Two million years ago, at the dawn of our genus, our founding fathers also lived in Africa, but had smaller brains that we modern humans, less sophisticated tool kits, and yet may have begun the process of behaving in more human family-like ways (forming long-term reproductive bonds and men provided parental care, though there’s also considerable debate exactly when in Homo these behaviors emerged).
Push back further into the past. Who were the founding fathers among the earliest hominins (humans and our close cousins after splitting off around 6 million years ago from a common ancestor of today’s chimpanzees and bonobos)? Those were highly furry ape-like bipeds who lived in Africa. They showed no glint of a constitution or wigs in their large-iris eyes.
The founding ape fathers around 20 million years ago discovered that hanging or swinging under tree branches was advantageous for survival and perhaps fruit-getting. Their teeth and upper bodies would change, equipping all descendants since with an ability to throw a baseball better than a monkey and to swing on monkey bars on the playground (which really ought to be called ape bars).
Push further, and you’d find founding fathers 65 million years ago at the dawn of primates, perhaps focused on eating insects in the forest brush. Further back, the founding fathers 550 million years ago exploded in more complex life forms (a Cambrian explosion), and over a billion years ago the first founding fathers emerged once sexual reproduction itself evolved from a sexless world.
Who do you picture as your founding fathers? Why do you imagine certain ancestors over others? Whatever the answers, we all are indebted to a lineage of fathers because we are part of their legacy, contemplating them today.