Three million years ago, there were primates which we now call australopithecines. The australopithecines had brains no bigger than chimpanzees, they were shorter than us, with very long arms, quite probably (though we do not know) they were covered in fur, but they were bipedal, as we are. We have even discovered their footprints and they look like human footprints. But the australopithecines were not humans. They may have been different in many ways from chimpanzees, but they were almost certainly even more different from us. They have taught us that bipedality has not always been synonymous with humanity.
The bipedal apes we call australopithecines were gradually replaced by bipeds whose skeletons were much more like ours, although their brains were scarcely bigger than those of their predecessors. Unlike the australopithecines, these animals seem to have made simple stone tools or weapons.
Toolmaking is not a specifically human attribute. Chimpanzees make a variety of tools out of perishable materials (see link). The australopithecines, whose hands were no longer required for locomotion, probably became better at toolmaking than chimpanzees are. Stone tools were a logical progression after that. They attract our attention, but perhaps only because unlike the tools made by chimpanzees and presumably by australopithecines, stone implements happen to resist the passage of time.
As time went on, brain sizes became typically bigger and the bipeds expanded their geographical range, from tropical Africa into Asia and Europe. They became able to live in 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. For a million years - a million years - they continued to make what we call "hand axes" of basically the same pattern, if with gradual improvement in technique.
This long slow development culminated (in Europe and some adjacent areas) with the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals had brains at least as big as our own. Were those bipedal, very clever (but very conservative) animals humans? Or were they something else?
Whatever they were, their slow development was in extreme contrast with the behaviour of their successors. 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 rapidly developed new technologies, 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 a complete contrast between the behaviour of these newcomers and the behaviour of all the earlier bipeds. Over a period which is quite insignificant in the geological time-frame - around 50,000 years or less than a thousand modern lifetimes - they have developed technology and social organization at a progressively more rapid rate, so that they - we ourselves - 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.
What distinguishes humans from other animals? There are are two obvious physical differences - bipedality and brain size. But there is another difference which (because it is behavioural rather than physical) has not always been given sufficient weight. This site suggests that what above all makes us different is our development of language and social organization. No other animal has that - and it makes all the difference. And the evidence suggests that language and social organization appeared only comparatively recently.
As students of evolution, we may have to come to terms with the conclusion that before there were people (and even, perhaps, for a time, simultaneously with people) there were intelligent animals which walked on two legs, made stone tools, probably even used fire, but who/which did not behave like people. And this idea is hard to accept - it requires a difficult psychological adaptation. We find it difficult to imagine a biped which is not one of our own species. Because we find this difficult, we are liable to misunderstand and distort the past.
It is quite common to refer to earlier bipeds as "man" or even to call the the australopithecines "the earliest humans" - simply because they were bipedal. This is a mistake; it should be avoided because it introduces ideas and associations about those animals which are quite inappropriate; it is in fact a kind of anthropomorphism. They were not humans at all, nor were they "man". They were clever and they walked on two legs, true - but the lives they lived had far more in common with the lives of other wild animals than with the lives we live today. The difference is more than one of words. It affects our perception of the lives they led and of their relationship to their environment.
In particular, we should not assume that bipedality enabled them to dominate their environment as we do and conferred immunity from predation. Or if it helped them to defend themselves from predation, we need to understand how. Their environment - initially tropical Africa - was a very dangerous place.
This site follows the development of those bipedal animals and their human successors as they gained more and more control over their environment until, with the development of agriculture, humans began to shape it to suit themselves.
The Pre-human Bipeds and their Environment
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