![]() ![]() This is the ladder theory of human evolution. Why did humans become so different: bipedal, upright, hairless, with limited strength, feeble jaws, bad backs, embarrassingly large heads and brains with a cerebral cortex four times the size of a chimp's?įor decades, the conventional evolutionary lineage was a simple one: shambling simian stands upright, evolves into bipedal hairy brute, then slouching hairy brute with hand axe and finally into hairless human with BlackBerry. The implication is that, long ago, the earliest human ancestors also lived in small social groups, and co-operated and competed for the resources of the woodland and the savannah. Early in the 21st century, some taxonomists and conservationists began a campaign to change the chimpanzee genus from Pan to Homo, so close are the parallels between the species.īut the African chimpanzee is an endangered species, down to perhaps 150,000, while the human population is about to tip seven billion. Twentieth-century scientists and observers started referring to humans as naked apes. The Victorians called them "man-like apes". Chimpanzees and humans have a genetic kinship so close that they share almost 99% of their DNA. Chimpanzees are opportunistic omnivores that also make and use tools for gain, and groups of chimpanzees in the wild have separate traditions, practices and ways of doing things that they pass down the generations. ![]() Chimpanzees display awareness of self, ability to reason, and a grasp of numbers. The other is that the human-chimpanzee connection is so clear that there is nowhere else to begin.įirst, the family likeness: chimpanzees struggle for status, vocalise, communicate, play politics, use subterfuge, show aggression, reject outsiders, groom and support each other, betray each other and resort to violence or sexual bribery to get their way. One is that the evidence is so sparse that people are free to frame a favourite hypothesis about what it was that made humans different. The fact that zoologists, anthropologists and palæontologists can write so many books with the word "ape" in the title tells us two things. These books are all attempts to work backwards, from what we are now to what we might have been. The consent is there in the titles of books published in the past 40 years: The Aquatic Ape, The Naked Ape, The Third Chimpanzee, The Talking Ape, Our Inner Ape, The Thinking Ape, The Monkey in the Mirror, The Hunting Apes, The Ape that Spoke and The Artificial Ape. "We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World," he wrote.Īnthropologists agree on the human-ape connection. Charles Darwin calculated as much when he began telling the story in The Descent of Man (1871). Some things are clear: the story began in Africa, between 5m and 7m years ago, with the last common ancestor of two kinds of chimpanzee and of Homo sapiens sapiens. ![]() If the story of humanity is a single volume, then only the last page survives.Įvery so often, scholars find yet another fossilised scrap of the missing narrative, a new character enters, and the plot takes a new twist. Almost all the text is missing, apart from the occasional phrase, sentence or paragraph, seemingly torn at random from the great six-million-year narrative. Is it a thriller, an epic or a comedy of errors? There is no dust jacket, no title page, no dedication, no acknowledgements. It begins in an unknowable past and continues mysteriously for the next five or six million years. H uman evolution must be the greatest story never told.
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