Page 115 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1416 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

for terrestrial bipeds. Small wonder, then, that this adap- Built for life out on the broiling tropical savanna, far
tation has become the de facto criterion for membership from the safety of the trees, it was apparently the
in Hominidae. However, it still remains possible, even unprecedented mobility of this striding biped, often
likely, that upright bipedality evolved more than once known as Homo ergaster, that led to its almost immedi-
within the ancestral group from which both living apes ate spread beyond the confines of Africa. Technological
and humans are descended. innovation, in the form of the deliberately shaped “han-
The best-documented early bipedal hominid species is daxe,” appeared later, also in Africa, at about 1.5 million
Australopithecus afarensis, known from sites in eastern years ago. During this period there also began a trend
Africa dating between about 3.8 and 3.0 million years toward hominid brain-size increase, although the exact
ago. Exemplified by the famous “Lucy” skeleton, this spe- pattern of that increase will have to await better under-
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cies was small-bodied, standing between about 3 ⁄2 and standing of hominid diversity through this period.
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4 ⁄2 feet tall. Such creatures retained a variety of features By about 1 million years ago hominids had penetrated
useful in climbing, though they would certainly have Europe and had begun to diversify there in a process ulti-
moved bipedally when on the ground. Above the neck, mately culminating in Homo neanderthalensis, which
however, the proportions of A. afarensis were apelike, had a brain as large as our own, albeit housed in a very
with a large face hafted onto a small, ape-sized braincase differently structured skull. Meanwhile, the lineage lead-
—which is why paleoanthropologists often characterize ing to Homo sapiens was evolving in Africa, although this
these early hominids as “bipedal chimpanzees.” This stage in human evolution is poorly—albeit tantalizingly
combination of features was a remarkably successful —documented by fossils. Both molecular and fossil evi-
one, remaining essentially stable as a whole variety of dence suggests that anatomically modern Homo sapiens
species of such “archaic” hominids came and went over had emerged in Africa by about 150,000 years ago, and
the period between about 4 and 2 million years ago. Liv- by around 100,000 years ago such hominids had
ing on the fringes of the forests and in the newly ex- reached Israel, which was also at least sporadically occu-
panding woodlands, hominids like A. afarensis probably pied by Neanderthals around this time. Interestingly, in
subsisted primarily upon plant foods, although they prob- the period of coexistence between about 100,000 and
ably scavenged the remains of dead animals and may 50,000 years ago, the Neanderthals and moderns of the
have hunted small mammals much as some chimpan- eastern Mediterranean region shared essentially the same
zees do today. technology. During this time, though, we find the first
It was presumably a hominid of this archaic, small- stirrings in Africa of the symbolic behavior patterns that
brained kind that first began to manufacture stone tools characterize Homo sapiens worldwide today. As more
around 2.5 million years ago. Consisting of small sharp sophisticated stone tools became common in Israel, pre-
flakes struck from one river cobble using another, these sumably developed by Homo sapiens whose ultimate ori-
tools were crude but remarkably effective, and must have gins lay in Africa, the local Neanderthals disappeared,
had a profound effect on the lives of their makers, allow- and in short order Europe was invaded by modern peo-
ing them, for instance, to detach parts of carcasses and ples, at about 40,000 years ago. These “Cro-Magnons”
carry them to safer places for consumption. left behind them an amazing record of virtually the
entire panoply of modern symbolic behaviors, including
Early Hominids with representational and geometric art in various media,
Modern Body Proportions music, notation, bodily ornamentation, elaborate burial,
Interestingly, no technological change marked the emer- and so forth. At the same time, technologies became
gence at around 2 million years ago of the first hominid enormously elaborated and embarked upon a pattern of
species with body proportions essentially like our own. constant innovation and change.