Anthropology

Some also learned to stand upright, enabling them to look over tall grass and free their hands for other tasks. Over a million years, humans known as the Homini, evolved in this way. The Homini are identified from their apelike ancestors by bigger brains and different teeth. First group with these traits are called Australopithecines (southern apes), who were from 1-4 million years ago.

• Oldest Skull: The australopithecines’ skull were apelike heads; a forehead, large eyebrow ridge, a flat nose. But their muzzles were shorter than apes and their teeth were arranged differently. This makes them closer to humans than apes.

• Powerful Jaw: They had more human-like jaws, but were more solid than ours and larger teeths.

• Growing Brain: Australopithecines’ brains are big as 4600-500 cc, a little bigger than gorillas'. Today we have a brain capacity of roughly 1400 cc. The brain-to-body ratio is high and the forebrain the seat of reason is exceptionally large.

• Bone Differences

  • Human necks are balanced on the top of the backbone. Gorilla necks meet its head at an angle.

  • Gorilla’s big toe sticks out at an angle and are used for grasping. In humans, the big toe is aligned with the others.

Prehistoric Food

Our ancestors ate had a closer relationship with animals and plants around them. With Thousands of years of experience, they knew which animals to hunt, plants to eat and which could be used to treat illnesses. Much of this knowledge has now been lost. The prehistoric diet was much more varied than our modern diet It even included many plants that we think of as weeds. After they began to grow corn, nutritious wild food was still eaten. 

These foods weren't preserved for long by drying or salting, so seasons had a strong effect foods. Another difference from our diet was that there were few sweeteners, except for honey.

• Medicine: Being nutritious, many plants have medicinal properties that have been used for thousands of years. Leaves of rue used for headaches and catmint was an ancient cold cure.

• From the woods: Woodlands yielded an abundant supply of wild nuts and barries, which are excellent sources of nutrition and can easily be stored.

• Family Foods: Each family member played his/her role in providing food. The men hunted and the bulk of food was often gathered by women and children. This consisted of such as plants, eggs, nuts, and perhaps fish.

• Salmon: From about 10,00 BCc, they used large spears to catch salmon in Europe.

• Spices: Besides salt which was used more to store food than to flavor it, many seasonings and spices have a long history, like coriander, which is also prized due to being good for digesting.

• Images find dandelion leaves, sunflower seeds, juniper, hazelnuts, almonds, mint, quail eggs,

The Toolmakers (page 10 - 11)

Roughly two million years ago, one australopithecine species evolved into another member of the human tribe, Homo. Compared with Australopithecus, Homo had bigger brains, more human-looking faces, and better hip bones adapted both of walking upright and to giving birth with babies with large heads. The earliest Homo genus could make tools and was therefore named Homo habilis (“handyman”). Toolmaking involves using memory, planning ahead, and working out abstract problems; it marks the beginning of our use of culture to help us to adapt to our surroundings - a uniquely human ability. The habilines probably also used some primitive communication forms to pass on knowledge. They seem to have used their tools to cut meta and smash open bones ofr marrow. They may have hunted animals, but it’s more likely that they scavenged carcasses, and that plants were still their major source of food. There’s evidence that they also made small, round huts to shelter in the earliest buildings in the world. They lived in East Africa, and related groups may have lived in South Africa and Southeast Asia.

The Piltdown forgery

Earlier this century, scientists were searching for “missing links” between humans and apes. Between 1912 and 1915 amateur archaologist Charles Dawson and later Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum, found a human skull with an ape’s jaw in a gravel pit at Piltdown, England, together extinct animals’ bones. For years, “Piltdown man” was accepted until 1953, when it was shown to be elaborate forgery. Who carried out the hoax is still untold.

• Brain Sizes: The brain is the habilines (650 - 800 cc) was largr than that of austrlopithecines. This development happened at the same time that the habilines gained the ability to make tools, although their brain was still only half size of a modern human brain.

Australopithecine brain

Habiline Brain

Modern human brain

• Size and Shape: Comparison between homo habilis and modern people show that the habilines were smaller (about 4ft/1.5 m tall), and almost certainly much hairier. Their feet seem to have been fully adapted for upright walking, like ours.

• Habilines’ homes: This reconstruction of a scene about 1.8 million years agois based on excavation at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The camp has been carefully placed near a lake where animals gather. In the foreground a group of habilines are constructing a shelter of branches kept in place by stones. 

Flint working (page 12 - 13)

The first tool-making human, Homo habilis, made simple pebble tools from various rock types ()

References

• Sources of this page: Early Humans - DK Edition

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