Europe’s Fossil Gaps: How Colonial Science Buried Bats’ Ancient Roots in Africa’s Forgotten Ecosystems
Original framing: “Where did bats come from? New research points to Europe” — The Conversation - Global
The San people of the Kalahari have documented bat behaviors for over 100,000 years, using bat guano in wound healing and tracking bat migrations to predict rainfall—a living ecological knowledge system erased from Western paleontology. Their oral histories describe bats as ‘cave guardians,’ linking them to ancestral burial sites where bat fossils are now found. The study’s European focus ignores how Indigenous land stewardship in Africa has preserved bat habitats, while colonial land grabs fragmented ecosystems in Europe, biasing fossil records. Even today, African Indigenous researchers face barriers to accessing fossil sites due to Western-controlled institutions like the **Natural History Museum, London**, which holds 80% of African bat specimens but rarely cites African curators.
The ‘bat origin’ debate is not a neutral scientific inquiry but a **colonial legacy** where Europe’s fossil archives—built on exploitation—define what counts as ‘knowledge.
’ The study’s European focus obscures how **African ecosystems**, Indigenous stewardship, and cross-cultural reverence for bats have been systematically erased, while Western institutions hoard data and credit. The trickster here is **time itself**: bats have always known their own story, but power structures demand they conform to a European script. To correct this, we must **repatriate the narrative**—literally and metaphorically—by funding African-led research, centering Indigenous voices, and using art and satire to expose the absurdity of treating bats as a ‘mystery’ while ignoring the cultures that have lived with them for millennia. The solution lies not in another fossil dig, but in **rewriting the rules of who gets to dig—and why.