The Achievements and the Days Book II. from Tribes to Empires

By Roland Maes

This is a fascinating book with a plethora of facts, ideas and concepts. The text of the second book starts with the development of chordates and follows through to the evolution of hominids and finally on to homo sapiens. The history of man is then charted through the Neolithic period in various parts of the world. This book finishes with the histories of several pre-Christian empires and a number of empires that started prior to 1500 A.D. These histories are documented with information about rulers, wars, specific battles and the religious consequences of nation-to-nation interactions. In covering many centuries and countries, the flood of details is daunting and cannot easily be summarized.
There are a number of interesting concepts raised. In the section on biological intelligence and survival, the author states that “The world is a creation of our nervous system.” On this subject, he notes the markedly different capacities that various other species have and the fact that they would perceive the world quite differently from humans; for example, birds, fish and crustaceans perceive magnetic fields and can navigate using these fields. Other examples are given.
In a section on human cognitive development, there is an extremely interesting discussion of the progression of the learning processes from birth through the adolescent period. This includes the sequence of acquisition of physical and mental capacities, as well as outlining morphological changes that occur concurrently.
In the section on evolution of hominids, the role that anatomy played in the progression or failure to progress toward homo sapiens was noted. For example, the form of the vocal canal of Australopithecines could not pronounce “a, i, u, g or k”, thus limiting communication, which was probably supplemented with gestures. Therefore, fully satisfactory communication was difficult in the absence of visual contact. Another example is that the quadriped’s breathing apparatus makes it impossible to talk and run at the same time. In contrast, breathing in bipeds is redirected, which aids in speech. The author adds “The brain structures that regulate bipedal locomotion in humans also regulate speech, indicating that bipedal locomotion was the initial selective pressure for the elaboration of brain structures that are essential for speech and syntax.”
In a section on population control, the author argues that regulation is not achieved by negative controls, such as starvation, predation, accidents and disease, but rather by the restraint of the population. He claims that it is the threat of starvation to come and not hunger today that dictates population density decisions. The example given is that an animal group will stake out an area sufficient to meet its needs. There are interesting findings that are added, even when some may only indirectly relate to the topic under discussion; Book 2 has the most of these interjections – a few examples: the queen bee controls her colony by a pheromone released by her mandibular gland; in choosing correct objects in a set, chickens do better than marmosets; captive trout have smaller brains than wild trout.
The author’s creed is put forward in an optimistic paean to humans: “There is a discontinuity of human nature from everything that came before. The most powerful motive for human beings is the desire to be good. This desire makes Man unique among animals. There is no animal model for human pride, shame and guilt. Human conscience, morality and mental life are not those of a bonobo. Humans have a spiritual nature. “Spiritual” stands for a being who is free enough to do things for reasons, self-conscious enough to entertain ideas about the significance of his deeds, planful enough to be aware of the long-term consequences of his actions and sufficiently “divinely” inspired to feel a justification in what he does. Plato and Descartes are right: human beings are a “special creation.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roland Maes
• Release date: Apr 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9782953933215

Roland Maes

Roland Maes was born in 1935 in Belgium. After acquiring a degree in zoology at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), he studied virology at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research (Tübingen, Germany) and at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy (Philadelphia, USA). He worked during a year at St Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, always in virology and thereafter was during four years Research Officer for the Pan American Health Organization, stationed near Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on hoof and mouth disease and interferon. He moved thereafter shortly to Brussels (European Headquarters of Travenol) and then to Strasbourg, where he was active at the Richardson-Merrel Research institute. He resolved to create his own company in Strasbourg, working mainly on the development of diagnostic tools for tuberculosis and on alternative medicine. This occupation put him in close contact with developing countries of the Asian and African continent. R. Maes is the author of numerous scientific publications.

Book preview

The Achievements and the Days

Book II: from Tribes to Empires

Roland Maes

Copyright © 2011 by Roland Maes

Revised February 2019

Published by Roland Maes at Smashwords

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Acknowledgments

This work would never have concreted without the help of Ernst Van Ingen. I thank him heartily for his assistance and patience.

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Table of Contents

Frontispiece

Introduction

Chapter 7. The Evolution of Hominids

7.1 The first hominids

7.2 The Australopithecines

7.3 Homo habilis

7.4 Homo erectus

mermaids

7.5 Homo neanderthals

7.6 Homo sapiens

7.7 The expansion

7.8 The biochemical basis of hominization

7.9 The Noosphere

Chapter 8. The Neolithic Expansion

8.1 Southeast Asia

8.2 America

Were the Spaniards first to reach America?

8.3 Europe

8.4 The Near East

8.5 Parameters affecting Sapiens successful expansion

8.6 Metallurgy

8.7 Gun powder

Chapter 9. Socialization and Humanization of Homo sapiens

9.1 Instincts

9.2 Sexual relations

9.3 Population control

9.4 From cosmic to ethic deities

9.5 The failure of God

Chapter 10. The Old World Empires

10.1 Primitive societies

10.2 China: the socialistic empire

10.3 Mesopotamia: the primitive tyrannical empire

10.4. India: the spiritual empire

10.5. Persia: the first colonial empire

10.6 Greece and Rome: the second colonial empire

10.7 Byzantium and Islam: the religious empires

10.8 Mongolia: the nomad empire

10.9 The Ottomans: the third colonial empire

About the author

other books

At the end of this book, find excerpts from

Book I: from the origin to the hominids

Book III: the christian Enigma

Book IV: The Diversity of European spiritual Histories

Book V: The improbable rise of the free Man

Book VI: Is Ship Earth heading toward a 21thcentury darkness?

Discover other works by Roland Maes available as e-books at Smashwords.com.

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rolandmaes

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Frontispiece: The Janissary.

Scene of the beginning of the XVIth century. Woodcarving.

Austrian peasants are brought in captivity.

The Ottoman Empire succeeded the Arab Caliphate as the last colonial empire which endeavored to dominate the whole of the known world in the name of Allah. It was successful until the XVIIth century but floundered in the 20th century with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. A new attempt initiated in the 21th century, with the creation of the Islamic State (DAECH) that expanded in Iraq and Syria. All conquests made in the name of Allah proceeded yesterday and proceed today and will proceed tomorrow with the savagery depicted in this frontispiece.

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Introduction to Book II

A chronological record of historical events shows that there is progress in humanization accomplished by some human societies but relapses in barbarity and regressions are also observed, which obscures the sense of the evolution. In most human societies, power is based on force, on lack of measure, on violence and on contingency. Death, misery and social violence are the lot of the vast majority of the human race. This was observed by J. Diamond (1) nd any informed person notices it daily when watching news on TV. Primitive Man lived in pacific, monogamous, sharing communities whose characteristics are still observable in this century in some communities (Inuit, Hottentot) and were reported in 1584 by English settlers to pertain to the Algonquin nations occupying the Atlantic shores of North America, yet the immense majority of human congregations that formed in the course of time evolved in hideous, ruthless political entities drenched in the blood of animal and human sacrifices, and remained so up to our days.

In the Old World, Sargon I, the Semite from Akkad, built a 5,000 man strong army, 4,300 years ago, and used it to create the first known savage empire. Standing armies exercising assiduously even in periods of peace, existed 2000 years ago only in China and Rome. I exclude nations as Sparta, where the whole male population was trained in combat. In the West, 1,200 years ago, the ephemeral barbarous Carolingian Empire made of the military service a condition for the possession of land. The three Christian empires, i.e. Rome after Constantine, Byzantium and the Ottonian Germanic Empire introduced a degree of humaneness in the administration of their subjects but they floundered and violence and cruelty reigned thereafter supreme among the European nations.

This book exposes and analyses how convivial and pacific primitive man regressed toward savagery and evolved toward his enslavement in empires. Book VI goes in the detail of the process.

Reference.

1. J. Diamond: Guns, germs and steel. The fates of human societies. 1998. WW Norton & Co. New York, London.

Chapter 7.

The Evolution of Hominids

This chapter is concerned with the attainment of a higher degree of consciousness by the hominids. These are the gorillas, the chimps and bonobos on one side and, on the other, the hominini, i.e. the genus Homo, Australopithecs and Paranthrops, of whom only survived Homo sapiens. Paradoxically, this higher degree of consciousness is acquired by an evolution of their feet: the trend to bipedal locomotion, fully adopted only by the genus Homo, is the key to the development of his brain. The evolution was complex, contrary to the assertions of Dobzhansky, Mayr and Sympson. The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky published in 1937 (1) his concept about the origin of Species. The views of the ornithologist Ernst Mayr followed in 1942 (2) The paleontologist George Sympson contributed his own ideas (3) These three views were synthesized into the concept of Neo-Darwinism, which Dobzhansky and Mayr proposed to the paleo-anthropologists. Dobzhanski certified that only one kind of hominid could have existed at any time and Mayr asserted that only three successive species could be discerned within the genus Homo. This erroneous concept that hominid evolution processed simply by the gradual change of genes under the guiding hand of natural selection swept away a vast panoply of mythology and tremendously, but erroneously, simplified the understanding of the human evolution process, which became at once a long single-minded struggle from primitiveness to human perfection (4). The incompleteness of the fossil record observed by researchers in the field was traced to missing links and these were consequently zealously searched. Each new find was touted as the missing link (e.g. Lucy).

Otto Schindewolf, a paleontologist expert not in anthropology but in ammonite mollusks, was of the opinion that all was not that simple. He suspected that the missing links were not found because they did not exist. He suggested that gaps in the record were not species boundaries but represented a saltation (5). Paleo-anthropologists, obsessed with tracing the history of the single species Homo back into the past, entranced by the notion of gradual change, unwilling to face and tackle complexity, spent much more energy to reduce Schindewolf to silence than to understand and correctly evaluate the available facts (4). Nils Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, who had studied the evolution of arthropods (trilobites) and snails, eventually vindicated Schindewolf :(6) far from being a single-minded linear struggle by a temporal succession of species, new hominid species spawned, competed and became extinct. Human evolution proceeded along lines similar to other species. Like the genus horse (see fig. 2.4), it was marked by numerous speciations and extinctions: modern humans are one twig on a great bush of experimental species.

Homo is one of the six genera that compose the tribe Hominini. Of these six genera, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus, Paranthropus and Preanthropus (7) prospered during the Pliocene, i.e. between 5.5 and 2.5 millions of years ago, and disappeared despite their superior intelligence. The oldest known hominid, Sahel-anthropus tchadensis named Toumaï, has been unearthed in AD 2001 in Chad's Djurab Desert and is dated to 6-7 million years ago. One adds to him Orrorin dating 6 million years ago.

The sixth genus, Homo, starting with the Pithecanthropus and the Sinanthropus, is composed of at least 14 species of which all disappeared except Homo sapiens, who emerged during the Pleistocene and managed to survive to the present. The convergent line of the hominids (according to the theory developed by Kuhn) is characterized by several achievements among which the most significant are the ability to make tools, the ability to make fire and the ability to transfer information through an articulated language. These achievements were by no means realized all at once.

Several issues are subject of hot ongoing debates. The first is the origin of H. sapiens. Does he naturally evolve from H. erectus or is he the product of a convergent line? The second debate turns around the relation of brain size to migration out of Africa. Was the migration possible only after a large brain was acquired or was the migration staged earlier in the evolution of the hominids? The third issue is the level of hominization reached by Neanderthal. Is his level of hominization the same as the one reached by H. sapiens or was he inferior? Has he been physically wiped out by Sapiens according to the concept of the struggle for life or has he disappeared by interbreeding with Sapiens according to the concept make love, not war? The fourth issue is the ranking of various human cultures.

Political, moral and scientific correctness makes it hazardous to advance that some cultures are more civilized than others. The present confusion of values holds it as ethically incorrect to classify and rank Humans and human activities. To deem Neanderthal inferior to sapiens, belonging to another species than sapiens, brings the risk to be accused of ethnocentrism. It is very serious: the pressure for consensus and the intolerance for dissent have grown to monstrous proportions during the 1990's and many scholars who have dared hold views that diverge from the mainstream (not only on the issues raised here but on the many issues I mention throughout this essay) have jeopardized thereby their careers and even lost their employment, even if the heterodox views they defended proved eventually to be correct. Modern States, and the scientific, economic and military assessors of these States, demand consensus, find dissent intolerable and practice censorship with the greatest of ease, going as far as killing those who express dissent. Even the contention that mass extinctions are not due to meteoric hits but rather to volcanic activity is a view that has been censored, as exposed by R. Zimmerman (This is the way the world ended. The Sciences, 39, 1999, 39-44) (8).

A final problem, not commonly discussed, is the biochemical machinery that allowed the evolution of hominids toward higher levels of consciousness.

Back to top

7.1. The first hominids

The evolution of the primates from Great apes to Homo has been remarkably described by E. Seinandre (Les origines de l' homme. Larousse 2011, ISBN 978-2-03-586383-6). I borrowed several pictures from his book.

There has during a long time existed a gap for the period extending from the first great apes (Proconsul: -20 million years) and the Australopithecines (-3.5 million years). Fossils of Kenyapithecus (-15 million years) were dug out but the period going from -10 million years to -5 million years was poor in finds, until Toumaï (-6 to -7 million years) was discovered in 2001 and Orririn (-6.2 million years) in Anno 2000. Lucy, a female Australopithecine who lived about 3.6 million years ago at Hadar in Ethiopia was baptized A. afarensis by D. Johanson and Y. Coppens. They named her Lucy because Lucy in the skies with diamonds, -which stands for LSD- sung by the Beatles, was their favorite song. Lucy stood long alone as the first known human ancestor and was the basis for the construction of an evolving line of hominids.

Lucy

Her curved fingers revealed grasping hands, whereas apes grasp with feet also. There were no clues about her own ancestors. The idea was that this ancestor was a large-toothed, fully bipedal, naked ape living in the Serengeti savanna 6 million years ago. It was erroneously held that this root ape quickly gave rise to A. afarensis, which in turn led to Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and Homo (fig. 7.1).

Figure 7.1. The skulls of the four most important Hominid species. The Neanderthal is a European specimen and sapiens is modern man. Note that Sapiens sapiens is erroneous and was applied when it was assumed that Neanderthal was part of the Homo group (See figure 7.7). Today, most anthropologists think that Australopithecus and Neanderthal do not belong to the line that ended up with Sapiens. Yet both H. sapiens and H. neanderthals descend from H. erectus, a genus that may be included in the Hominid group. Only eighty-seven genes separate Homo sapiens from Neanderthal, and a direct affiliation has been proposed in 2012 by Robert Bednarik (see 7.6.1. The origin).

The true reason fossils older than 4 million years were not found is because fossil hunters for a long time scoured the open grasslands, which proved to be wrong places. In 1992, an American team found Ardipithecus. It dated 4.4 millions years back. Other Ardipithecus were found, dating back 5.8 million years. Ardipithecus is claimed to toe off in a manner seen only in upright walkers. Ardipithecus lived in forests, not in grassy savanna and ate soft fruit. Orrorin was found by a French-Kenyan team. He is 5.7 to 6 million years old. Here, the claim is that Orrorin walked more human-like than Lucy. This implies that Orrorin is the ancestor of Homo, by way of a proposed genus Pre-anthropus, taken from fossils initially classified among the Australopithecines. The French claim that Ardipithecus is only the ancestor of chimps while Lucy and other Australopithecines are a dead end. This seems today to be the exact process of hominization. Orrorin was eating soft fruit and leaves, and lived in a wooded environment, like Ardipithecus. A third team, also French led by Brunet, who was trained as a zoologist specialized in mammal fossils, found a fossil on 19 July 2001 in the Chad desert dating over 6 million years, which they baptized Toumaï.

Toumaï

The skull of Sahel-anthropus tchadensis, i.e Toumaï, looks like that of an ape, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, large incisors and widely spaced eyes like a gorilla's. But the shape and size of its canines, small and un-sharpened, and lower face resemble those of human ancestors that came later. The snout proper to chimpanzees was much reduced in Sahel-anthropus. It is in some respects more hominid-like than Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.4 million years ago. The age of Sahel-anthropus pushes the limits, dating the split between the hominid and chimpanzee lineages to 7–8 million years ago. But what distinguishes a hominid? Is it erect station and upright walking? Then Oririn is a hominid. Is it the reduction in canines? Then, Sahel-anthropus is a hominid. Both are.

This discovery killed the thesis defended by the French paleontologist Yves Coppens that hominids evolved solely on the east side of the Rift Valley while apes evolved on the western side. Also, the Chad region, now a desert, was a thick forest in those days, indicating that bi-pedalism was not acquired after a climate change forced apes out of the trees into the grasslands. Upright walking may have started in the forest. In fact, bi-pedalism may have evolved more than once.

In 1999, Kenyanthropus was found. It lived from 3.5 million years until 2 million years. It moved between grasslands and wooden habitats. He represents probably an isolated twig of the tree of the hominids. The view was long held that there is nothing more than one hominid evolving from 6 million years to 2.5 million years. Today, the thought that all these fossils represent diversity within a single species that unfolded into each other in a linear procession is abandoned. Instead, the contemporary opinion is that these species are a radiation with diversity present from the start. We have a bushy tree with different hominids hanging off different branches at the same time, making it difficult to draw a clear line of descent.

7.2. The Australopithecines

The extensive ice deposits that began to appear six million years ago on the poles lowered substantially the level of the seas, dried up part of the earth and erased plant life in many regions. When the ice melted, the initially empty plains were swept with wind. Very fertile dust, i.e. loess, was deposited. Grass that had lately intruded on the world scene grew, and various mammalian herbivores occupied the newly formed niche, with their sequel of predator carnivores. This set of conditions favored the development of an evolving line among great apes.

Abundant remains of 10 different species of Australopithecines are found in Pliocene rocks all over East Africa, from Lesotho to Ethiopia. They are about 4.5 million years old and lasted until -2.5 million years. These Australopithecs are placed in a separate group that constitutes the first radiation of our own evolving line since the separation from the Great Apes. The Australopithecs are not our ancestors but our cousins. They dominated the African continent during 2 million years before disappearing without descendants.

7.2.1 Australopithecus afarensis

It showed a severe sexual dimorphism, the females being much smaller than males. The animals walked erect. They had brains as small as those of chimpanzees, i.e. about 350 ml, whereas Homo sapiens has a liter more, 1,350 ml. The circumvolutions of the brain of these animals were those of a monkey; they probably could not talk. Their teeth were as developed as those of chimps. The females weighed about 25 kg and measured 1.0 meter. The males were bigger. They looked like bipedal chimps and were found all over Africa. No sign of the use of tools could be detected in association with the early Australopithecines.

One may conjecture that the erect posture obtained by the Australopithecines provoked a potentially unfavorable obliquity of the pelvis and its orifices. The delivery of babies would then be difficult if these babies were big in regard to the orifices of the basin. It is possible to estimate the birth-weight of the Australopithecines. Assuming a maternal body weight of 22.5 kilos, the newborn Australopithecus would weigh between 1.1 and 1.7 kilos. If the size of the head relative to that of the body of such a new-born compares with the size of the head relative to the body of new-born chimps, then the head of the Australopithecine new-born was smaller than the principal diameters of the pelvic inlet of the mother. This would still have been true if the size of the head had been that of a baby gorilla.

The conclusion that newborn Australopithecines were small in relation to the pelvic inlet suggests that delivery was quick and easy. This was a selective advantage. There were probably no selective forces whatsoever in the early stages of hominid evolution pressuring towards an enlargement of the pelvic canal to ensure easier parturition. In fact, the selective pressures towards effective bi-pedalism must have been much stronger.

The human sapiens foot is fairly small and short for the length of the leg. It denotes an adaptation to erect walking rather than erect posture. For a human, it is less tiring to walk than to stay immobile erect. Pre-hominians show a distinctive evolution towards the ability to walk in an erect posture long distances in the heat. Whereas most tropical animals, including the carnivores, rest during the heat of the day and are active at dawn and sunset only, the bipedal hunter can sweat the heat off like a horse, continue to walk, harass its prey and exhaust it. An herbivore needs lots of food of a poor nutritive value and needs time to digest it. After the chase of a big herbivore during a day or two, the animal is in such a poor condition that the killing becomes easy. The evolution during the Tertiary era is thus decidedly focused on adaptation to the environment, not on evolving a larger brain, even if a larger brain was the ultimate result of this evolution.

The vocal canal of the Australopithecines is practically identical to that of the chimpanzee. The Australopithecines were thus unable to pronounce the sounds (a), (i) and (u), nor (g) and (k). This must have drastically reduced their ability to communicate through sound alone and, like chimpanzees, they probably supplemented it with gestures. This means that no fully satisfactory communication was possible when the interlocutors were out of sight.

A quadruped's breathing apparatus makes it impossible to talk and run at the same time. When chimps run, they have to take a breath for every step, which makes it impossible to develop the respiratory control necessary for speech. The acquisition of the erect posture by the Australopithecines allowed the redirection of breathing in the service of sound making. Bi-pedalism was the key event in human evolution necessary for the emergence of speech. The brain structures that regulate bipedal locomotion in humans also regulate speech, indicating that bipedal locomotion was the initial selective pressure for the elaboration of brain structures that are essential for speech and syntax.

The first exploits of Australopithecus must have been to steal their prey away from carnivores; it was a scavenger ready to run away if need be. Gradually its size and skills improved, so as to become a hunter and a self-assertive being itself. This was achieved with Paranthropus. Until 1.9 million years ago, there lived also a small species of Australopithecus africanus.

7.2.2 Australopithecus africanus

Australopithecus africanus

It has long been thought that A. africanus was a forest-dweller, at home in trees. A fine examination of his teeth shows that he ate not only fruits and leaves, available in the forest, but also grasses and perhaps animals that ate grasses (9). The controversy is open: did forest-dwelling hominids roam woodlands and grasslands for food? Did they consume animal foods before the development of stone tools and the origin of the genus Homo? Their teeth may very well have developed for the consumption of nuts. Chimps use big tree branches to open nuts, and the mothers teach their children how to do it. Nuts have been found to be a staple food for hominids and the teeth and jaws of A. africanus are sturdy enough to crack nuts open without the need of a wooden branch. Nuts need not be consumed immediately: they may be stored and some human populations, e.g. the Corsicans, consumed chestnuts as their main staple diet until about 80 years ago. Nuts contain taxofene, which is an anti-cancer drug, and are extremely rich in fatty acids. There is no need to postulate the consumption of meat and fish by early hominids to account for the development of their brains, which is demanding of fatty acids.

7.2.3 Paranthropus

Paranthropus (left) versus Australopithecus

Paranthropus (-2.7 million to -1 million years) was an evolution line that showed a distinct chewing specialization. Although there could not possibly be any confusion, he was, upon discovery, classified as an Australopithecine, probably because paleo-anthropologists were impregnated by the idea that only one kind of hominid could have existed at any time. He was as big and tall as modern man (i.e. 1.5 meters tall and more, and 50 kilograms). He had enormous teeth and his brain was a little more voluminous than that of Australopithecs, i.e. about 600 ml. but this may have been due solely to his bigger stature. His diet was restricted to nuts, grains and plants of all sorts, small animals and insects. He apparently used no fire, which makes it difficult to recognize tools that he may have used, if not made. Lack of fire likewise restricted his wanderings to the warmest parts of the planet. He did well there, since he could be found all over the Old World. His hands indicate that he could handle and make utensils, and his bipedal aptitudes were superior to those of Homo habilis, who appeared later.

Our intelligence derives, as first stated by Leroi-Gourhan in 1960, from a bipedal locomotion that favored the development of the brain in a rapid and important manner. It frees our hands, which are then able to manipulate and make utensils, which in turn may be applied to the mincing of food, which allows an abandon of powerful mastication muscles. These, less developed than previously, do not need anymore powerful bony insertions along the parietal sides of the skull, which limited the development of the head forward and on the sides. Yet, A. africanus was a better walker than Lucy and A. anamensis, much older than Lucy, was still the best walker of all. From all these indices, one deducts that the bipedal locomotion was developed around -8 million to -10 million years ago and this ancestor, still not discovered, would have given birth, depending on the environment, to the Great Apes, which returned to quadrupedy, to Australopithecs, who conserved aptitudes to climb in trees, and to the pre-humans, who opted for bipedy.

The adoption of bipedal motion and erect station demanded a modification of the hips. The great apes have a long and narrow basin. Their bowls and liver are maintained in position by the skin and abdominal muscles. This forbids them long walks erect since the fetus and bowls would then sink. To prevent this, the bipeds need a rounded basin, shorter in height and larger, able to hold the organs and fetus in place when they walk. The basin of the Australopithecs, although shorter and larger than that of the Great Apes, did not possess the needed curved basin able to maintain the bowls and fetus in position

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Basin of Australopithecus

By rounding up and in-curving to maintain the bowls, the basin of erect bipeds tends to narrow the pelvic inlet. This closing hinders the passage of the head of the baby at parturition. This may be the reason why the brain of Australopithecs remained small during the 4 million years of their existence. At birth, the volume of the head of a Homo sapiens baby is 75% smaller than that of an adult, i.e. 350 cubic centimeters, which is nearly that of an adult Australopithecus. At birth, this baby head occupies 98% of the maternal cavity. To limit the difficulties of parturition, the bones of the baby's head are incompletely ossified, allowing a deformation of the head if need be. It well seems that the fetal development of the cranium slowed down during the same time that it increased in volume, with Homo habilis, 2.5 million years ago.

7.3. Homo habilis

Homo habilis

The earth's climate cooled substantially 2.5 to 3 million years ago. Water was sequestered at the Poles and equatorial regions dried up, which was favorable to bipeds. These were the Parantrop who disappeared a million years ago, and two species of Homo, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. Two million years ago, the chimp-sized brains of the early australopithecines almost doubled in a growth spurt. Homo habilis, who lived in Tanzania from -2.4 to -1.6 million years ago, is characterized by a progressive reduction of the dental and facial apparatus and by the development of cranial capacities that led to an increasingly preponderant social and material culture. Homo habilis measured 1.30 meters and weighed 35 kilos. His bipedy was poorly ascertained. He had a bigger brain (550 to 680 cubic centimeters) than Paranthropus (420 to 600 cubic centimeters) but also has a different brain circumvolutions' pattern. His Broca area (which controls human language in Sapiens, I discuss that in later sections of this essay), has a pattern quite similar to that of modern man. Homo habilis must have been able to master the pronunciation of some sounds. He also made stone tools.

Choppers and flakes (fig. 7.2) are first detected between -2.5 to -2.7 million years and they remained in use, with improvements, at least two million years. However, primitive large bifaces appeared about 1.5 million years ago.

Figure 7.2. Chopping tools. The chopper and pick are made from pebbles flaked on one side only. The little more sophisticated biface was made by detaching flakes from one end of a cobble but no trouble was taken to work out the heel.

The oldest known cultural evidence, dating about -2.5 million years ago, suggests that some hominids had developed by that time behavioral patterns that were of fundamental importance for the evolutionary differentiation of modern Homo sapiens from other primates. These patterns included tool manufacturing and use, meat eating and operation out of a home base. These patterns were fully exploited two million years ago, when the humid wooded Savannah of northern Kenya changed suddenly to an open landscape with extensive grasslands, and lasted 1.5 million years.

7.4. Homo erectus

Homo erectus, i.e. the Pithecantrop and Sinanthrop, originated in Africa. Remains dating -1.8 million years, together with simple Oldowan stone tools, have been found in Tanzania (Olduvai Gorge). In Kenya (Turkana), a date of -1.9 million years is plausible. This early species of H. erectus, sometimes called H. ergaster, had a brain case inferior to 800cc and was of a small size. Representatives of this early H. erectus sensu lato species were found in the Republic of Georgia (Dmanisi) 1.7 million years ago (10). Very rapidly, the species expanded and evolved toward a larger size. The evolved H. erectus was tall, i.e. 1.7 meters for 60 to 70 kilos, and traveled until the Extreme Orient, where the Sinantrop reduced his size to 1.65 meters but increased the size of his brain to 750 to 950 cubic centimeters.

Sinanthrop

Until the find of Dmanisi, the fossil evidence was that early humans did not journey out of Africa until they could walk long distances and were smart enough to invent sophisticated tools: these traveling hominids supposedly had to have big brains and long limbs. Three Dmanisi skulls have been discovered, associated with primitive stone tools, which suggest that our ancestors left Africa at an earlier stage of evolution. One skull has a cranial capacity of just 600 cubic centimeters (cc) (11), compared to 650 cc and 780 cc for the other two skulls, and is thus substantially smaller than expected for Homo erectus. Modern human brain-cases are about 1400 cc. These three skulls tend to indicate that the discovered group is intermediary between H. habilis and H. erectus. Thus, the Dmanisi hominids might be descended from primitive H. habilis ancestors, which had already left Africa. A heretical further possibility is that H. erectus itself evolved outside Africa, still considered the cradle of human evolution.

From there, the dispersal took momentum and members of the species went East and were found in Java (putative -1.8 million years) and in China (Longgupo Cave, - 1.9 million years but the bones are doubted to be human and Gongwanling, -1.1 million years), with a concurrent evolution of the species into H. erectus sensu stricto. This H. erectus sensu stricto was found only much later in Italy (Ceprano, -900,000 years), Spain (Atapuerca -780,000 years) and France (Tautavel, -450,000 years). The speed of its expansion toward the East, backed with such primitive tools as stone flakes, scrapers and chopping tools, and the much later expansion in Europe, is an enigma. It was long thought that this late expansion was due to the inability of the species to face cold but it was found in 2013 that the occupants of Atapuerca did not originate from Africa but probably from Siberia. This human species dug up at Atapuerca is called Homo antecessor and is believed by some scientists to be the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals. Cut marks on bones of 800,000-year-old H. antecessor show that the inhabitants of the cave were feasting on human flesh.

The next oldest undisputed traces of early humans outside Africa are primitive tools found at Ubeidiya, Israel, dated to be as old as -1.5 million years. These tools, which appeared in Africa 1.6 million years ago, are of a primitive Acheulean type, which includes hand axs and other tools carefully crafted according to a preconceived plan. The evolved Acheulean technology was rarely seen outside Africa until about 500,000 years ago and this lack of expansion is difficult to understand, compared with the success of the Oldowan toolmakers. The early age and primitive Oldowan technology of the Dmanisi site indicate that the initial hominid dispersal out of Africa was driven by biological and ecological parameters, not technological innovations. The drive was probably the urge to fulfill the increasing energy requirements of larger body sizes, perhaps met by a greater exploitation of animal protein.

The question, facing these different tools and fossils, is if they were members of one single species, namely H. erectus, which included later fossils in China and Indonesia, or did they belong to two different species, the second one called H. ergaster. Was H. ergaster the human ancestor, and H. erectus an Asian dead end? A million-year-old skull from Ethiopia dug up in 1997 tends to settle the case in favor of only one single species, H. erectus, because this skull shares key features with both the early African and the somewhat later Asian and African fossils and, therefore, links them all as interbreeding members of the same wide-ranging species that gave rise to living humans. There was apparently one single species that spread from Africa to Europe to Asia 1 million years ago, rather than several different species alive at once.

7.4.1 Brain size increase

A second brain surge, linked to Pithecanthropus, occurred 500,000 years ago and increased hominid brain size by another 75%, bringing it close to the 1300-1500 cubic centimeters of today.

The skeletons of Pithecanthropus or Man-Apes or Homo erectus are associated with the use of fire. Whereas the skeletons of the Australopithecines are rare, those of the Man-Apes are found in relative abundance from Peking to the shores of the Atlantic, in Casablanca or in Heidelberg. They had formidable jaws and a flat forehead with teeth quite similar to those of modern man. Despite the bestiality of the face, their skeleton was remarkably modern. However, whereas the cranial cavity of modern man is about 1,350 ml, the brain size of the first Pithecanthropus found in Java is 900 ml, which is 10% less than that of the more tardy variety of Pithecanthropus that appeared in China, whose brain size was about 1,000 ml. Thus, human anatomical features were gained before the brain acquired a size above the level of the great apes.

It does not seem that a structured language as we know it, based on at least five vowels and a number of consonants, was possible for any hominid, including Neanderthal, because of an adverse mouth configuration. However, socializing and group activities were necessities for Pithecanthrop hunters if they were to succeed in their enterprises and we can assume that some sort of language was in use. This would reinforce the need for a larger brain. Bipedal locomotion had required the transformation of the pelvis, so that the full weight of the body could be carried on it. As a consequence, the female birth canal decreased in size, which was of no consequence as long as the babies were small. In order to accommodate to the need for an increased cerebrum, the hominid fetus must then have begun to be delivered at earlier stages of development so that the nervous central system could continue to develop after parturition. The baby becoming thereby more dependent, the need to care for it has patterned the