This page was last updated on April 16^th, 1999.

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Imagine being transported back onto the plains of Africa 4 million years ago in the middle of a dream. However, you look around your surroundings and wonder where in the world you really are: for everything looks so different from the Africa you knew in the classroom textbooks and the discovery channel programs on television. Just around the horizon, you notice a group of what seems to be a group of upright chimpanzees moving toward your way. "Upright chimpanzees?" you wonder, filled with puzzlement. As the group nears, you see the creatures more clearly. Their muzzles are extremely protruding, such as that seen in the faces of chimpanzees; their zygomatics (cheekbones) are of staggering size; their skull domes are low and sloping, merging with the pronounced brow ridge; their bellies are notably protuberant; and yet ... they walk upright!

The band of a few dozen individuals are foraging for food: mainly tubers, roots, nuts, edible plants, and an occasional piece of meat scavenged from a carcass. You also become aware of sexual dimorphism (or difference in size among different genders) between the males and females of the troop, with the males towering above the females. Probably, if it were not for the fact that they were bipeds , you would surely have thought them to be apes. Their behaviour closely resembles that of apes, their anatomy from the neck up is almost that of an ape; in fact, almost every feature of their physique is simian except for its legs and position of the foramen magnum.

This is a somewhat dramatic picture of the daily lives for our earliest ancestors, mainly based on well-informed conjectures of their behaviour. While it is impossible to discern for certain the life science of these now-extinct species--who have left nothing except "bones and stones" behind--paleoanthropologists can infer from the fossil evidence various details of their lives. For example, there was a fossil, discovered in one of the South African caves, that had two perforations at the back of the skull. Initially, it was thought that this was the work of killer apes, inflicting injury on members of their own species. Later, however, it was discovered that the canines of an extinct leapoard, whose remains were found in the same cave, fit exactly the two holes at the back of the ancient hominid skull. Thus, it was concluded that large savanna predators (such as leapoards) preyed on the early hominids. An inference of this conclusion would be that our ancestors were more the prey than the predators. Many likewise conclusions and inferences have been based upon other fossil finds. Adding it all together reveals a rich patchwork detailing the daily lives of our most distant ancestors.

These pages cover the whole time period from Ardipithecus ramidus to Cro-Magnon. Please feel free to explore them!

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