The first separately published work on human origins published in the continent of Africa. Hillier's text was read on his behalf before the Eastern Province Literary and Scientific Society in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa, and published in the Grahamstown Journal  on 23 and 25 November 1886. It was reprinted in the 1887 New Year edition of the East London Dispatch, a newspaper also published in the South African province of Eastern Cape. 

In his Descent of man (1871) Darwin postulated that the ancestors of humanity would eventually be found in Africa, based on the extensive primate populations there. However, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the exception of Alfred Hillier and Langham Dale, paleoanthropologists focused their researches in Europe and Asia rather than Africa. This focus only very gradually began to change after Raymond Dart discovered Australopithecus africanus in 1924.