11 Perkin personally sent his new colour directly to the Empress Eugenie.
12 The popularity of Perkin’s product at home and abroad led to demand for additional colours.
13 Perkin’s dyes enabled scientists to see certain microbes and bacteria for the first time.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Beachcombing for early humans in Africa
From the earliest modern humans to the present day, our species has evolved dramatically in both biological and behavioural terms. What forces prompted these momentous changes?
A
Kenya has long been known as the ‘cradle of mankind’ following the discovery of fossils thought to be of the first members of the human family, which arose in Africa around 6-7 million years ago. Various distinct species evolved from these ancestors over millions of years, including our own – Homo sapiens – around 250,000 years ago. ‘A lot of the research on the origins of modern humans has focused on defining their point of origin, then understanding why humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago to colonise the rest of the world,’ says anthropologist Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr of Cambridge University. ‘But we have no idea what happened between 200,000 years and 60,000 years ago. We also have very little information on what occurred inside Africa after 60,000 years, when the different population groups and languages we see today evolved. The genetics suggest that the expansion out of Africa is just the tip of a massive population expansion inside the continent.’
B
Along with fellow Cambridge anthropologist Professor Robert Foley, Mirazón Lahr is investigating the evolutionary history of modern human populations. ‘The challenge is to find the sites where evidence of these early people can be recovered – their stone tools, the animals they hunted, their ornaments and, ultimately, the fossils of the people themselves,’ she says. She has chosen to focus on East Africa based on the theory that its past environment was suitable for sustained occupation over time. But the region is huge, and finding the right place to look is absolutely crucial. ‘In the past there were periods of enormous rainfall in the tropics,’ she says. ‘The lakes were much higher and their margins were wider. We are looking at where the ancient lake margins would have been when the lakes were last high, and that’s where we look.’ D
C
Some of their most spectacular finds have been on the ancient Turkana beaches in Kenya’s Rift Valley. ‘Ten thousand years ago, this area was wetter, with animals such as gazelles, hippos and lions, and the beaches are still there, even though the lake is long gone 21. We’ve found a great many shellson the surface, and a small number of harpoons the people fished with. A lot has already been exposed by the wind, and occasionally we find sites where things are buried, and then we dig,’ she says. ‘We’re looking at the stone tools and how these relate to times of particularly high water levels. Then we’re looking at the fauna and, if we’re lucky, we find actual human fossils. The oldest fossil ever found that looks like a modern human is 200,000 years old, and comes from the Turkana Basin. We’re trying to find the fossils that mark the origin of Homo sapiens.’
