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Good morning The hymn Jerusalem has become something of an unofficial national anthem for the English - even though, when we lustily sing "and did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green? etc" the answer to William Blake's question has to be a resounding No. He was referring to the legend, for which there is no historical evidence whatever, that at some point in his life, Jesus Christ visited England's "green and pleasant land". But a different set of ancient feet did indeed walk here, and archaeologists have just found evidence to prove it. A low tide has uncovered an area of ancient mudflats off a Norfolk beach which still bears the impression of footprints from a small group of human beings, which have been scientifically dated as being between 800,000 and a million years old. This is the earliest evidence that human beings existed that long ago anywhere in Europe, or indeed anywhere outside of Africa. Norfolk Man has been named as Homo Antecessor, which simply means early or pioneer. Our own species of human, homo sapiens - or to give us our full name homo sapiens sapiens - is thought to have originated much later, 150,00 to 200,00 years ago. But the African connection is still there. One of the most surprising recent discoveries from the world of genetics is that every human being now alive on Planet Earth had a common ancestor. So we all share a great great great - to the power of N - grandmother. Mitochondrial DNA passes unmodified from mothers to daughters. And DNA from various diverse racial groups - ranging from northern Europeans to Australian aboriginals - has been found to share this common characteristic. This original mother of the whole tribe of homo sapiens sapiens has even been given the name Mitochondrial Eve, and it's thought she lived somewhere in East Africa. I mentioned "racial groups", but to be accurate there is only one human race. Mitochondrial Eve proves we're all from the same family. Whether we are also related to the Norfolk footprinters we'll probably never know. The name Eve is an obvious reference to the story of Adam and Even in the Bible. This Biblical narrative about human origins had been used, long before DNA was discovered, to support belief in monogenesism - that we are all related to the same ancestors. Indeed, once the historical truth of the Genesis story was no longer thought credible in the light of evolutionary theory, monogenesism stood more or less alone as the one abiding moral truth that Genesis still had to offer us. It's crucial - because it shoots down every claim to racial superiority. I find it a pleasing irony that this basic ethical insight about humanity from the book of Genesis has now been confirmed by Darwinian evolutionary biology.