http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 1 African Prelude To find the first protagonists in this prelude we need to travel outside both Britain and Europe to Eaast Africa where the present evidence suggests that human beings originated. The evidence is found in the form of fossil bones which became embodied in rocks after the individuals died and were washed out again by natural processes at a much later date. In East Africa most of the fossils that are eroded out onto the surface are remains of animals but amongst them the fieldwalkers sometimes come across the bones of human creatures that lived at the same time. In almost all cases so far the fossils are remains of single bones or fragments of single bones. Very few partially complete skeletons have ever been found; the reason for the scarcity of articulated bones is that hominid dead were not buried but lay on the surface to be dismembered by scavengers who consumed or scattered the remains. As far as we can say at present the story of human evolution can be conveniently begun ten or twelve million years ago with Ramapithecus which lived in a forested environment with open areas amongst the trees. It was a genus of pre-hominids probably made up of several species living not only in Africa but found also in Europe and Asia. Remains consist mainly of the jaws and teeth of approximately thirty individuals. We know little about its way of life but study of the teeth suggests that as well as seeds and grasses one species was also capable of eating food that had to be torn to pieces before it could be chewed. It may be that it searched for food in the open areas as well as in the forests, making a dash for the safety of the trees whenever it was approached by a predator. If so, some of the food sources it came across could have been the carcases of other animals. This might suggest that its small canine teeth are evidence of a diet that included both meat and vegetation so Ramapithecus could have been as omniverous as we are ourselves today. Too little of the skeleton of Ramapithecus has been discovered to enable us to say whether it normally walked on two legs or on all four. If the pelvic bone were found, it would give us the answer for in monkeys and even in modern chimpanzees it is too slender to support an upright carriage and would have to be much sturdier for its owner to be bipedal. At about this time global environmental changes were occurring, causing the dense forests that covered large parts of Europe, India, Arabia and East Africa to shrink and be replaced by extensive open grasslands. So most apes, dwellers in the forest, specialized to living amongst the trees, were subsequently restricted to a smaller habitat. It was the good fortune of our early ancestors, like Ramapithecus, that they were not so specialized and they were capable of exploiting the new environment that was opening up. But to be efficient in the open grassland a physical change was desirable, the ability to walk upright for long periods and eventually to become totally bipedal. Our ancestors were already predisposed to an upright stance since in the forest they had been below-branch movers like gibbons today. The physical change, involving, as has already been mentioned, some skeletal modification, was probably the result of several contributory factors. All sorts of suggestions as to what these may have been have been made including the fact that an upright gait would produce less thermal stress on the individual's brain than walking on all fours and less thermal stress would allow the brain to expand; quadrupeds expose some 20% of their bodies to the overhead sun, while humans expose only 5%. Holding the body further from the ground also reduces heat from ground radiation. An upright stance would make it easier to see over long grass and hands freed by upright walking could be used more easily to manipulate tools and carry offspring. Males could carry food to provide for nursing mothers. More energy is required for knuckle-walking like chimpanzees than upright walking which allows foraging for longer periods. Also, on the savanna it would have been an advantage to lose body hair. Other mammals pant to cool down, humans sweat which cannot be fully successful unless the skin is exposed to the air and the upright posture exposes more of the body to the breeze. Although individuals at this time were smaller than modern humans, probably averaging not much more than 1.6m in height, their bodies were becoming humanlike. But the skull perched on top of the developing upright body would still have been very primitive and enclose a much smaller brain than we possess today. It is now clear that the old assumption that the mental capacity (brain size) developed in advance of the human physique is wrong. We now know that it was the other way round. The old assumption was the basis of the idea behind the Piltdown hoax when skull fragments of a modern type were discovered in a gravel pit in southern England in association with an ape-like jaw. Doubts about this 'ancient man' increased for forty years until the bits of bone were subjected to a flourine test in 1953 which measures the amount of flourine absorbed by bone from groundwater and should establish contemporaneity when objects have been in the ground alongside each other for the same period of time. In this case the amounts of flourine in the skull and jaw were not the same so the bones were not contemporaneous and could not have belonged together. It was later established that the teeth had been filed down and the bone stained with cold tea or some other liquid. The skull turned out to be a modern human one and the jaw had originally been the property of an orang-utang. Later on in Africa, millions of years later, during which period there are very few finds of fossil hominids, we enter an exciting period when the evidence becomes much fuller. Practically all of it has been discovered since 1972. The oldest hominid remains yet known were discovered at Aramis in the Middle Awash valley of Ethiopia. Teeth, a child's jaw, skull fragments and arm bones are described by the scientists as belonging to a species dubbed Australopithecus ramidus. It is the closest that they have got so far to the common ancestor of humans and apes. On the basis of these discoveries it is calculated that this ancestor must have existed perhaps 4.5 to 5.5 million years ago, shortly before Australopithecus ramidus scavenged the countryside and walked 1.20m tall 4.4 million years in the past. Another new find is of a species that existed not long afterwards known as Australopithecus anamensis whose fossil bones have been discovered at Kanopoi further to the south. Some half a million years later lived Lucy, three-quarters of whose skeleton survived to tell us that, apart from her female sex, she was only just over a metre tall. She has been assigned to an Australopithecus afarensis species which may have survived as a distinct species for up to a million years. Another dramatic find was made at Hadar in Ethiopia where a large collection of fossils turned up. The discoverer of Lucy, Don Johanson, believed he had uncovered there other members of the single species Australopithecinus afarensis. But another expert, the Frenchman Yves Coppens, who has done a study of the collection, believes he can distinguish at least two species in the assemblage: a robust individual that he agrees may belong to the Australopithecinus lineage and another which he thinks resembles the Homo genus that can be recognized positively in later times and, possibly, a third species, also belonging to the more primitive Australopithecine line. These individuals probably lived more than three million years ago at about the time of some famous hominid footprints uncovered by Mary Leakey at Laetoli in Tanzania. Disagreements of this kind are common amongst those who study the remains of our most ancient ancestors. In the remote past at Laetoli three hominids walked across a patch of volcanic ash and their footprints have been preserved by extraordinary geological chance. Although small, they are identical to footprints which are made by human beings today in the sand of a modern beach. This site is the best proof we have that by this time early man was fully bipedal. By 2.6-2.5myrs ago some groups of hominids had mastered the basics of stone-tool manufacturing. Some evidence comes from a site at Gona north of the Awash River in Ethiopia. Here cores and whole flakes were being turned into choppers that were used as hand-held multipurpose tools. This is the earliest appearance of the Oldowan technology that has been extensively studied at Olduvai Gorge. The fact that the much later Olduvai tools were little different from the Gona examples suggests that there was a stasis in the technology of something like a million years. There were no associated fossils at Gona but the excavators point out that two contemporary hominids are known from elsewhere in eastern Africa in geological deposits comparable with those at Gona. These hominids are the Homo species and Australopithicus aethiopicus. It was the discoveries made by Mary Leakey and her husband, Louis, at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania from 1959 that really ushered in the modern era of investigation into early man. The Olduvai Gorge is a 25-mile long valley carved out of sedimentary deposits by a seasonal river. These deposits are stratified in the sides of the gorge and are alternately natural soils in which remains of ancient creatures are found and volcanic tuffs that can be dated. Louis and Mary Leakey started excavating there in the mid-1930s discovering fossil hominid bones and tools of ancient man. From the lowest level of the archaeological layers, Bed 1, crude tools were extracted, the hand choppers, referred to as the Oldowan Industry. In the top layers of the Gorge was evidence of the activities of modern man. Subsequently, in the intermediate layers, was found a variety of hominid remains and tools of various ages. At Olduvai Mary unearthed most of a skull of Australopithecus (sometimes called Paranthropus) boisei which was dated by the potassium-argon technique to one and three-quarters million years ago. This dating method was developed by geologists and provides a timescale for a sequence of volcanic deposits and any archaeological layers that may be sandwiched between them. An isotope of potassium (K40) contained in volcanic tuffs decays into an isotope of argon (A40) at a known rate so that the measurement of the relative amounts of each in the sample gives an estimate of its age. The same technique was used to date the remains of two other early hominids: Australopithecus africanus and Homo habilis found not far away. It seems that all three were living in the same area at the same time. Africanus differed from boisei in having a slighter build while Homo habilis was included in the Homo genus because of its more human-like teeth and larger brain. Its brain capacity of 750ml compares with the 500cc of Boisei and the 450ml of Africanus. Homo habilis is presumed to have made and used tools and there are at least two types of habilis, one of which may be given a separate species name in the near future. One type has been found in South Africa alongside a relation of Boisei known as Paranthropus robustus. Robustus was the most successful of the hominids, surviving for a million years. Although it had a small brain, it was much larger than apes. Brighter than a chimpanzee, it was an upright walker and the sexes were well defined by the larger size of the male. Tools found at Olduvai Gorge belong to two main groups or assemblages. The earliest are simply pebbles that have a couple of flakes knocked off at one end. These are the chopper or pebble tools and as time went on appear to be more carefully made but still remain general-purpose implements held in the hand.. Also in the tool kit was a rough scraper and a possible hammerstone. The earliest known examples of chopper tools, the earliest authenticated human tools, appear in the archaeological record about 2.5 million years ago. The Oldowan industry continued in use at Olduvai and elsewhere for a very long time. Then, between 1.6 and 1.5 million years ago, a more advanced technology abruptly appeared. This is called the Acheulian Industry and in chronological terms it overlapped the Oldowan Industry by about a million years. Its chief product was the handaxe. Shaped like a pear and flaked more carefully than the chopper tool, it can sometimes be a beautiful object. Other tools produced by later Acheulian toolmakers included choppers, cleavers, chisels, awls, scrapers, hammerstones and anvils. Nothing like them is found amongst the Oldowan assemblages. The appearance of the Acheulian Industry tools in upper levels of the Olduvai Gorge has been associated with the arrival of a new hominid, Homo erectus. With its considerably larger brain size of 900cc, it seems to have co-existed with the earlier hominids for a considerable period after its first appearance some one and a half million years ago. But in time the Paranthropus and Australopithecine genera died out as did the earlier species, Habilis, leaving the future to the new species which was destined to colonise other areas of the world outside Africa. Autralopithecines and Paranthropines left their fossils behind but little evidence of their life-styles. They have left no tools, we cannot identify their camping places and their ecological signals in the archaeological record are very faint. This contrasts with Homo who made stone tools and was a meat-eater who scattered animal bones around its extensive camping places. Diet was related to brain capacity. The energy requirements of mammals of the same size is roughly the same. Our hearts, livers and kidneys are much the same weight as those of the apes but our guts are about a kilo lighter and the energy that is saved by this discrepancy is utilised for our larger brains. Why the large gut in the apes? Their food consists of leaves, grasses and roots that require a massive digestive apparatus. Meat and proteins are more easily digested. The smaller guts went along with smaller teeth that are better suited to a carnivorous diet. main page [LINK] Beginnings out of Africa [LINK]