The Metropolitan Museum's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History offers related educational essays. Throughout this section, text links to the Timeline are marked with an asterisk.

It has been pointed out many times that every human group in the world today has its own origin myths. Indeed, if there is one cultural universal, this is surely it. In the Metropolitan Museum's marvelous exhibition, "Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture" we learn about a host of tribal myths of this kind, as they are reflected in various African cultural traditions, and in some of the most graceful and evocative sculptures ever made. But in the Western world, as well, we have a whole variety of such myths on offer. The most famous of these is probably the biblical creation myth which so many appear to prefer in translation. But among them we also have one very special and unusual origin story. This is the scientific account of how we came to be human, and it is a story in which the continent of Africa plays a central role. Unlike other origin myths, which are timeless and at least in principle unchanging, the scientific story is purposely designed to be a transient one. Science does not, or certainly should not, set out to prove anything about the world and its origins. Scientific statements are not for the ages, as most origin myths are intended to be. Instead, science is about the continual refinement of our picture of the world, and of its components, and about how they all fit together into a functioning whole. Scientific knowledge is by its very nature provisional; for if nothing else science is surely about progress; and how can we make scientific progress if what we believe today is not somehow wrong, or at least incomplete?

Science advances by throwing out idea after idea and then discarding the bad ones, those that fail a rigorous process of testing against other knowledge. It may take many years for a bad scientific idea to be rejected, just as it may take years for a good one to be finally accepted; but science is less a body of knowledge than an ongoing and self-correcting process. And the upshot is that, although most scientific ideas may today appear to be true, or as good as true, they are always susceptible to modification or at least refinement in the longer term. To paraphrase Keynes, "In the long run, we are all wrong." So the story that I shall be telling is very different, by its very nature, from the stories that are told by the sculptures on display in this exhibition. Nonetheless, its intent is inevitably similar. One of the most fundamental characteristics of our species Homo sapiens is its unquenchable curiosity about the world around it, and about itself and its place in that world in particular. Science is simply one possible response to this apparently innate need. For science, like mythology, seeks to explain; and surely an explanation for the extraordinary nature of human consciousness is well worth seeking.