Today man is the dominant animal on our planet. Our ancestors were ape-like animals that lived in trees. Scientists have carefully reconstructed our history from fossil bones preserved in rocks that have given an idea of what our ancestors were like. The remains of their tools and weapons are clues to how they lived. There are still many puzzles, but new discoveries are being made to add to the story.
Scientists think that a small ape-like creature called Ramapithecus could have been our ancestor. This animal lived in forests between 14 and 6 million years ago, probably sleeping at night in the safety of tree branches and only coming down to ground level during the day. Most of the time they scuttled on all fours, but they may have sometimes stood on their hind legs, perhaps when stretching to grab food from young fruit trees. From this developed one of the main differences between us and other animals, the fact that we walk on two legs instead of four. Scientists believe that Ramapithecus is our ancestor because of the shape of its jaw and teeth, which were more human-like than ape-like.
About 14 million years ago there also lived another ape-like creature called Dryopithecus, which scientists say may have been the ancestor of today’s ape. Living in Africa about 3 million years ago there were several types of man-apes called hominids, this name comes from the word homo, which means man. One type of hominid was Australopithecus and there were several types. The tallest grew no taller than around 1.5 meters and their brains were only half the size of ours, but they could walk on two feet. They ate plants and fruits and probably bird eggs when they had the opportunity to steal them.
At the same time another hominid called Homo lived, it had a larger brain than Australopithecus and scientists believe that it was a direct ancestor of man. Homo was a carnivore where small groups hunted slow, sick or young animals. They may have used stones and thick branches to kill them. Very slowly, over millions of years, hominins developed and changed, and remains have been unearthed in East Africa that have found traces of our tool-making ancestors. Scientists have named them Homo habilis, meaning handy man, who is believed to be one of the earliest members of the larger group known as Homo erectus.
Homo habilis is the first of our ancestors known to have made and used tools. They were simple stone crushers and sharp stone fragments, where the manufacture of such tools gave rise to today’s science and technology, and also made the first shelters. These were made from branches and branches, using stones and rocks to support them, which would have given them greater protection from the weather and fierce animals when sleeping at night. And as a matter of interest because they didn’t know how to make a fire, the meat was torn apart and eaten raw.
There are few remains that show how homo erectus gradually developed, but we do know that about 250,000 years ago, a new kind of people lived, and these were Homo sapians, which means wise man, and this is the group we also belong to. and there were several types of Homo sapians.
The Neanderthal people were heavy, stocky guys with strong muscles and sloping foreheads, and they lived mainly in Europe at the time of the last ice age. They must have been difficult because during this time much of Europe was covered in ice and snow all the time.
The first fully modern peoples of Europe appeared about 40,000 years ago, and these first peoples are called Cro-Magnon, after the place in France where their remains were first found. Scientists aren’t sure what happened to the Neanderthals, it may have been because the Cro-Magnons had better tools and weapons and traveled in larger groups, being able to kill them, or it could have been that they couldn’t adapt to the warmer climate. weather when the ice age ended.
Besides being good hunters and artists, the Cro-Magnon people had many other skills. They made needles from chips of reindeer antlers that they used to sew animal skins for clothing, and they didn’t have cotton thread like we use today, but instead used strips of leather or gut. Cro-Magnons loved jewelry, they made beads, bracelets and pendants out of many things like pebbles, shells and fishbones, we know this because they were often buried with them when they died.
It has taken a lot of careful study to piece together ideas about the development of early man, and new discoveries often mean changes to these ideas, so nothing can be taken for granted. And like a whole civilization that lives on this planet, humanity has progressed with the knowledge and technology that we know today and it’s increasing rapidly, and who knows what we may evolve into in the far future, because look how far we’ve already come.