Understanding Early Man

Some twenty years ago, I began a quest to understand man. Why are we the way we are? Can we be a kind and caring species that voluntarily takes care of our brother without asking for

anything in exchange, or is that contrary to our nature, to survival? Were those traits bread in to us so we as the small creature on the savanna without thick skin, without claws and tearing fangs, without the speed of a leopard, could work as a group to out-size, out-muscle the predators that controlled our environ? Did it require the violence that has dogged our existence since modern man emerged, our seemed inability to be kind just for the sake of kindness?

I have no answers, but my curiosity drives me to study our earliest ancestors, starting with the first creatures we considered to be predecessor–Australopithecines. To date, I’ve reached Homo erectus. Along the way, I’ve read a slew of wonderful books by brilliant scientists:

• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (actually, all of Johanson’s books)
• The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey (and all of all of the Leakeys’ books)
• Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution by Carl Swisher III, Garniss Curtis and Roger Lewin
• Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-age Saga of Homo erectus by Noel T. Boaz and Russell Ciochon
• Evolution of Homo erectus by G. Philip Rightmire
• Meeting Pre-historic Man by G.H.R. von Koenigswald
• Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims
• The Acheulian Site of Gesher Beno Ya-aqov by Naama Goren-Inbar et al

A New Idea Why Man Stood Up

Almost all mammals walk on four limbs. Those that occasionally stand or walk bipedally, do so awkwardly and for specific and short-term reasons (i.e., a threat gesture).

Of all mammals, only humans are fully developed bipeds. We do everything (almost) on two limbs. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have come to agree that upright posture is the crucial adaptation that accounts for the divergence of the human lineage from the African apes.

“The fundamental distinction between us and our closest relatives is not our language, not our culture, not own technology;” said Richard E. Leakey, a paleontologist and son of Mary Leakey and the late Louis S. B. Leakey; renowned fossil hunters in Kenya. “It is that we stand upright, with our lower limbs for support and locomotion and our upper limbs free from those functions.”

Why did we rise up? Most paloeanthropologists cite the following reasons:

• to travel distances by walking. Arguably, one of man’s great defining characteristics is his stamina–his ability to travel distances. A bipedal locomotion serves that skill better than a quadrupedal one