When Darwin first suggested that humans were descended from primates, no significant fossils of early hominids had yet been found. Not long after, the first Neanderthal remains were discovered. That and many subsequent discoveries have since made it much easier to map our place in nature. But although there is now no shortage of evidence, that place is still incompletely understood. The Darwinist tradition has always tended to underestimate the unique attributes of mankind. Yet we have only to look around us to see that in at least one important respect - our total domination of nature - we are quite different from any other animal. How has this total domination been achieved? Why has no other animal achieved anything comparable? If we are to try to answer this question, we need to look more closely at the timescale of bipedal development.
We now know that there have been bipedal animals with skeletons increasingly similar to ours for several million years. There was a long period during which bipedal apes and their successors preceded us. The first bipedal apes - now called australopithecines - appeared at least 3-4 million years ago and quite possibly much earlier; they were followed or replaced about 2 million years ago by the first animals generally now classified (on the basis of their bones, which are all that remain of them) as members of the genus Homo. Various Homo variants appeared, whether new species or not, over the following 1-2 million years. As time went on, brain sizes became typically bigger and the genus expanded its geographical range, from tropical Africa into Asia and Europe.
From about 200,000 years ago, there was a bipedal species in Africa now dignified by science with the name Homo sapiens. To what extent this species initially possessed all the attributes of modern humanity remains controversial. What appears certain is that suddenly, around 50,000 years ago, the archaeological record throughout Eurasia shows the presence of bipeds anatomically identifiable with Homo sapiens who behaved quite differently from their predecessors. They were quite clearly humans. Humans very quickly replaced all earlier bipeds, expanded to the habitable limits of Africa and Eurasia, colonised Australia (and probably many other islands) by boat and finally (only about 10-15 thousand years ago) colonised North and South America - rapidly to their habitable limits.
There is an extreme contrast between the behaviour of humans and the behaviour of all the earlier bipeds. Over millions of years, our bipedal predecessors gradually acquired bigger brains and became better able to cope with colder environments; but (as far as we can judge) their technology progressed extremely slowly and quite probably their lifestyles hardly changed in hundreds of thousands of years. In cultural terms, all the earlier bipeds - up to and including the Neanderthals - may perhaps have belonged as much with the great apes as with the people of our own species who followed them.
By contrast humans appeared quite suddenly as animals in a hurry. Over a period which is quite insignificant in the geological time-frame - around 50,000 years or less than a thousand modern lifetimes - we have developed technology at a progressively more rapid rate, so that we now dominate all other forms of life. We have first eliminated almost all dangerous and competitive animals; then we have tamed useful animals and plants and the forces of nature and made them serve us. We have emerged into the world which we now know - a world in which we take for granted the total domination of our own species. No other animal has achieved anything remotely comparable.
In this site, a sharp distinction is made between the two very different periods of bipedal development. I shall try to show my reasons for this in the pages that follow.
The Pre-human Bipeds and their Environment
Contents
Note: The Human Species