JUSt BEFORE CMAS 1887, a young Dutcor cra, in tc Indies, ention of finding t h.

    1Several traordinary about to begin   o t ally, and noted t e tomake tentional. omist by training ology. Nor o suppose t t Indies ed t if ancient people o be found at all, it ed landmass, not in tive fastness of an archipelago.

    Dubois o t Indies on notronger ty ofemployment, and t Sumatra  in ant  is most extraordinary in allt  he was looking for.

    At time Dubois conceived o searced of very little: five incomplete Neandertal skeletons, one partial jaainprovenance, and a ly found by rail acliff called Cro-Magnon near Les Eyzies, France. Of tal specimens, tpreserved ting unremarked on a s ingrock from a quarry in Gibraltar in 1848, so its preservation  unfortunatelyno one yet appreciated  er being briefly described at a meeting of tarScientific Society, it  to terian Museum in London, urbed but for an occasional liging for over ury. t formaldescription of it  ten until 1907, and t named illiam Sollas“ency in anatomy.”

    So instead t for t early  to t unfittingly, as it  anoto alocal sceacerest in all tural. to  credit teact, sa ype of e ers of dispute for some time.

    Many people refused to accept t tal bones  at all. August Mayer,a professor at ty of Bonn and a man of influence, insisted t tco of Belgium.

    merely ting inGermany in 1814 and o to die. .   tally  up a cliff, divested s, sealed t of soil. Anot, puzzlingover tal’s ed t it  of long-term froo reject ties en o embrace t singular possibilities. At about time t Dubois ting out for Sumatra, a skeleton found in Périgueux lydeclared to be t of an Eskimo. Quite  Eskimo France ably explained. It ually an early Cro-Magnon.)It  t Dubois began   instead used fifty convicts lent by tcies. For a yeartra, transferred to Java. And team, for Dubois ed tes—found a section of ancient rinil skullcap. t of a skull, it s tinctly nonures but a mucAntus (later ceco Pitus) anddeclared it today  as us.

    t year Dubois’s ually complete t lookedsurprisingly modern. In fact, many ants tis modern, and o do is an erectus bone, it is unlike any oto deduce—correctly, as it turned out—t Pit.  a scrap of cranium and one toote skull, we.

    In 1895, Dubois returned to Europe, expecting a triumpion. In fact,  nearlyte reaction. Most scientists disliked bot manner in of an ape, probably a gibbon, andnot of any early o bolster edanatomist from ty of Strasbourg, Gustav Sco make a cast of the skullcap.

    to Dubois’s dismay, Sc received far moresympatic attention tten and folloure tour inered, Dubois o an undistinguision as a professor of geology at ty of Amsterdam and for t to let anyone examine hisprecious fossils again. he died in 1940 an unhappy man.

    Mean, tralian-born omy at ty of tersrand in Jo a small butremarkably complete skull of a cact face, a lo—a natural cast of tone quarry on t at a dusty spot called taung. Dart could see at once t taung skull  of aus like Dubois’s Java Man, but from an earlier, more apelike creature. s age at t Australopit to Nature, Dart called taung remains “amazingly ed tirely nee the find.

    ties o Dart to Dubois.

    Nearly everyt  Dart, it appears—annoyed t ably presumptuous by conducting ts in Europe. Even ralopition, combining as it didGreek and Latin roots. Above all, ed wisdom.

    at least fifteen million years ago in Asia. If  oday o announce t ral bones of just didn’t fit  was known.

    Dart’s sole supporter of note  Broom, a Scottisologist of considerable intellect and cric nature. It ance, to do en.

    ing dubious anatomical experiments on ractable patients. ients died, o dig up for study later.

    Broom , and since  in Souto examine taung skull at first  once t it ant as Dart supposed and spoke out vigorously on Dart’s be to no effect. Fort fifty years t taung c textbooks didn’t even mention it. Dart spent five years o publis. Eventually  to publisogetinue ing for fossils). For years, today recognized as one oftreasures of ant as a paper on a colleague’s desk.

    At time Dart made  in 1924, only four categories of ancient als, and Dubois’s JavaMan—but all t  to change in a very big way.

    First, in Ced Canadian amateur named Davidson Black began to poke around ata place, Dragon Bone  was locally famous as a ing ground for old bones.

    Unfortunately, ratudy, tomake medicines. e can only guess us bones ended up as asort of C of bicarbonate of soda. te ime Black arrived, but  alone quitebrilliantly announced thropus pekinensis, which quickly became knownas Peking Man.

    At Black’s urging, more determined excavations aken and many otunately all  ter ttack on Pearl ingent of U.S. Marines, trying to spirit t of try, ercepted by t tes  bones, t t t  t hem.

    In time, back on Dubois’s old turf of Java, a team led by Ralpe of t Ngandong. Koenigs for a tactical error t oo late. en cents for every piece of o tically smaso small ones tomaximize their income.

    In tified tralopitransvaalensis, Parantype as ypes o comfortably overa o add to ten  by a succession of differentnames as paleoants refined, reions. SoloPeople us, and, finally, plainus .

    In an attempt to introduce some order, in 1960 F. Clark y ofCions of Ernst Mayr and otting to just tralopitionalizingmany of tus. For a time orderprevailed in the hominids.

    2It didn’t last.

    After about a decade of comparative calm, paleoant and prolific discovery, ed yet. t by some to be t by ot tobe a separate species at all. ter, ecessor, as  ofaustralopitillotogety types of erature today.

    Unfortunately, almost no ts recognize ty.

    Some continue to observe tralopite genus called Parantill ot praegens into Australopito a neion, iquus, but most don’t recognize praegens as a separatespecies at all. tral auty t rules on ted is by consensus, and ten very little of t.

    A big part of tage of evidence. Since time,several billion ributing a little geneticvariability to total ock. Out of t number, tandingof ory is based on ten exceedingly fragmentary, of per it all into truck if you didn’t mind2 in ts members, traditionally called ures(including extinct ones) t are more closely related to us to any surviving cogeties believe t cans sh humans and chimps in a subfamily called homininae.

    t is t tures traditionally called ,  on t designation.) he aue sunerfamily which includes us.

    attersall, tor ofant tural ory in Neal world archive of hominid and early human bones.

    tage  be so bad if tributed evenly time andspace, but of course t. ten in t tantalizing fashion.

    us ed territory from tlantic edge of Europe to t if you brougo life everyus individual wence we can vouc fill a school bus.

    s of even less: just tial skeletons and a number of isolated limbbones. Somet-lived as our oion  certainly not be kno all.

    “In Europe,” tattersall offers by ration, “you’ve got ed to about 1.7 million years ago, but t a million years beforet remains turn up in Spain, riginent, and tanot a erribly muc’s from tary pieces t you’re trying to  tories of entire species. It’s quite atall order. e really tle idea of tions species— deserve to beregarded as separate species at all.”

    It is tc makes eacinct fromall tens of tons distributed at regular intervals torical record, t emerge instantaneously, as t gradually out of otingspecies. to a point of divergence, ties are, so tit becomes exceedingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, to distinguise us from an early  is likely to be bots can often arise over questions of identification from fragmentary remains—deciding, for instance, s a female Australopithecus boiseior a male homo habilis.

    ittle to be certain about, scientists often o make assumptions based on ots found nearby, and ttle more t guesses. As Alan alker andPat Se tool discovery uremost often found nearby, you  early ools ly madeby antelopes.

    Perter typifies tary bundle of contradictionst  rates and in different directions—time, er apeness. Some auties don’t believeegory at all. tattersall and z dismiss it as amere “ebasket species”—one into ly s.”

    Even t species don’t agree on  never came to anything.

    Finally, but perure is a factor in all tists uraltendency to interpret finds in t most flatters tature. It is a rare paleontologistindeed  to getexcited about. Or as Joatedly observes in t isremarkable en t interpretations of nes discoverer.”

    All ts, of course, and nobody likes to argue more ts. “And of all ts per s Java Man —a book, it may be noted,t itself devotes long, o attacks on ticular thors’ former close colleague Donald Johanson. here is a smallsampling:

    In our years of collaboration at titute unate, reputation for unpredictable and s, sometimes accompanied by tossing around of books orly to hand.

    So, bearing in mind t ttle you can say about ory t  bedisputed by someone some certainly   whis:

    For t 99.99999 percent of our ory as organisms, ralline as cually not tory of c seven million years ago something major happened.

    A group of neropical forests of Africa and began to move abouton the open savanna.

    tralopit five million years t ral is from tin for “soution in text to Australia.) Australopities, someslender and gracile, like Raymond Dart’s taung curdy and robust, but all fe is  even t successful ories many times longer t achieved.

    t famous ralopit eam led by Donald Johanson.

    Formally knoy”) 288–1, ton became more familiarlyknoer tles song “Lucy in ted ance. “S ancestor, tween ape andhuman,” he has said.

    Lucy iny—just t tall. Sterof some dispute. Sly a good climber, too. Muc entirely missing, so little could be said  s suggested it  books describe Lucy’s skeleton as being 40percent complete, t it closer to ural ory describes Lucy as te. television seriesApe Man actually called it “a complete skeleton,” even  .

    A  many of ted. If you  femurfrom a specimen, you don’t need t to knos dimensions. Strip out all tbones, and total you are left  is called a on. Even by ting standard, and even counting test fragment as a full bone, Lucyconstituted only 28 percent of a on (and only about 20 percent of a full one).

    In ts . Jo ed t—more total, and a fairly important oo, one tribute  to deal  all events, rat Lucyt isn’t even actually kno sive size.

    ter Lucy’s discovery, at Laetoli in tanzania Mary Leakey found footprints leftby t is t—ts ralopition. ter  for a distance ofover ty-ters.

    tural ory in Ne of t depicts life-sized re-creations of a male and a female African plain. t  t suggest  striking feature oft t arm protectively around t is atender and affecting gesture, suggestive of close bonding.

    tableau is done ion t it is easy to overlook tion tvirtually everytprints is imaginary. Almost every external aspect of tional. e can’t even say t t ain t tralopito beaustralopites.

    I old t t because during t toppling over, but Ian tattersall insists  tory isuntrue. “Obviously  kno ride measurements t togeto be touc e an exposed area, so t’s o give tly worried expressions.”

    I asked roubled about t of license t aken in reconstructingt’s alions,”  believe o deciding details like   toli figures. e simply can’t knoails of  ure and make somereasonable assumptions about t to do again, I t sligures  humans.

    they were bipedal apes.”

    Until very recently it  olicreatures, but noies aren’t so sure. Altain pures (teetance) suggest a possible link bets of tralopitomy are more troubling. In tinct attersall and Scz point outt tion of t of t not of tralopit line bet ed an australopitoan ape femur  p. t,t not only  our ancestor, s even much of a walker.

    “Lucy and  locomote in anytstattersall. “Only ravel bets o do so by tomies.” Joaccept t of ten, “rees as it is for modern humans.”

    Matters greill in 2001 and 2002 ing family at Laketurkana in Kenya and called Kenyantyops (“Kenyan flat-face”), is from about time as Lucy and raises ty t it or and Lucy betugenensis, t to be 6 millionyears old, making it t  found—but only for a brief  of C  bones) found a  7 million years old,  it   an early ape andtures and quite primitivebut t, and t.

    Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refaso a fullload-bearing instrument. to preserve trengt becomparatively narro immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birtly increased dangerof fatality to moto get tig must be born ill small—and  care, wurn implies solid male–female bonding.

    All tic enougellectual master of t, but  t have been enormous.

    3Absolute brain size does not tell you everytimes even mucs and  rouble outting tract negotiations. It isrelative size t matters, a point t is often overlooked. As Gould notes, A. africanus imeters, smaller t of a gorilla. But a typical africanus male  at 600 pounds (Gould pp. 181-83).

    So  of ts? Probablyt ters fromto tlantic, diverting s aic and leading tot of an exceedingly situdes. In Africa, turning jungle into savanna. “It  somuc Lucy and  ts,” Joten, “but t tsleft them.”

    But stepping out onto t t ter, but could also be seen better. Even no preposterously vulnerable in to name is stronger, faster, and toottack, modern ages. e rategies, ands. e are turet can  a distance. e can to be physically vulnerable.

    All ts o ion of a potentbrain, and yet t seems not to ralopit all. t gro t tools.  is stranger still is t  forabout a million years tools, yet tralopitook advantage of tec hem.

    At one point bet appears types coexisting in Africa. Only one, ed to last: s beginning about teionsralopit ted for sometralopit andgracile alike, vaniseriously, and possibly abruptly, over a million years ago. No oneknot Ridley, “e them.”

    Conventionally, ture about erally “man tween, and depending on wer, us, and ecessor.

    o use tools, albeit very simple ones. It ive creature, muc its brain  50 percentlarger t of Lucy in gross terms and not mucionally, so it ein of its day. No persuasive reason o groime it  big brainsand uprigly related—t t out of ts necessitatedcunning nerategies t fed off of or promoted braininess—so it er ted discoveries of so many bipedal dullards, to realize t t connection bet all.

    “to explain attersall.  of t devour 20 percent of its energy. tively picky in , your brain  complainbecause it  toucuff. It s glucose instead, and lots of it, even if it means s-ces: “tant danger of beingdepleted by a greedy brain, but cannot afford to let t o death.” A big brain needs more food and more food means increased risk.

    tattersall tionary accident. ep if you replayed tape of life—even if you ran it backonly a relatively s o te unlikely” tmodern hem would be here now.

    “One of t ideas for o accept,”   tion of anytable about our being  is part of ourvanity as  end to tion as a process t, in effect, o produce us. Even ants tended to t up until tly as 1991, in textbook tages of Evolution, C.

    Loring Brace stuck doggedly to t, ackno one evolutionary deadend, t australopited a straigon of development so far, t on to a younger, fres seems certain t many of trails t didn’t come to anything.

    Luckily for us, one did—a group of tool users,  of no, it existed from about 1.8 million years ago to possibly as recently as ty thousandor so years ago.

    According to tus is tcame before er; everyt came after  to , t to use fire, t to fasools, t toleave evidence of campsites, t to look after tus remely smembers long-limbed and lean, very strong (mucronger telligence to spread successfully over o otus must errifyingly po, and gifted.

    Erectus or of its day,” according to Alan alker of Penn StateUniversity and one of ties. If you o look one in tmigo be  “you  connect. You’d be prey.”

    According to alker, it   the brain of a baby.

    Altus  for almost a century it tered fragments—not enougo come even close to making one full skeleton. So it until an extraordinary discovery in Africa in t its importance—or, at t, possible importance—as a precursor species for modern ed.

    te valley of Lake turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in Kenya is no productive sites for early  for a very long time no one  to look t  edover t  mig. A teamco investigate, but at first found note one afternoon KamoyaKimeu, Leakey’s most renoo yield muc t ofrespect for Kimeu’s instincts and to tonis found a nearly complete usskeleton. It  nine and tructure,” says tattersall, in a  precedent. turkana boy was “very empically one of us.”

    Also found at Lake turkana by Kimeu s t clue t us eresting and complext. t of an agonizing condition called aminosis A, old us first of all t us ing meat.

    Even more surprising  t of gro sign of tenderness inion.

    It  us skulls contained (or, in tained) a Broca’s area, a region of tal lobe of ted h speech.

    C ure. Alan alker t y to enable speec ted about as wellas modern cably Richey could speak.

    For a time, it appears, us   seems to y.

    taken literally, suggests t some members of t about time as, or even slig Africa. tists to suggest t per in Africa at all, but in Asia—o say miraculous, as no possible precursor species side Africa. to appear, as it aneously. And anyill o explain  to Africa so quickly.

    ternative explanations for us managedto turn up in Asia so soon after its first appearance in Africa. First, a lot of plus-or-minusinggoes into ting of early ual age of t timates or t ty of time for African erects to find to Asia. It is also entirely possible t oldererectus bones a discovery in Africa. In addition, tes could be ogether.

    Nos. Some auties don’t believe t turkana finds are us at all. t alturkana skeletons ensive, all otus fossils are inconclusively fragmentary. As tattersall and JeffreyScz note in Extinct  of turkana skeleton “couldn’t be compared ed to it because ts  knourkanaskeletons, tus and  temporaries. Some auties insist oncalling turkana specimens (and any oter.

    tattersall and Scz don’t believe t goes nearly far enoug er“or a reasonably close relative” t spread to Asia from Africa, evolved intous,and t.

    is certain is t sometime ivelymodern, uprig Africa and boldly spread out across muce rapidly, increasing ty-five miles a year onaverage, all s, and ots andadapting to differences in climate and food sources. A particular mystery is  side of ty no even drierin t. It is a curious irony t tions t prompted to leave Africa o do so. Yet someo find to the lands beyond.

    And t, I’m afraid, is ory of is a matter of long and rancorous debate, as we scer.

    But it is  all of tionary jostlingsover five million years, from distant, puzzled australopito fully modern ure t is still 98.4 percent genetically indistinguisures your distant ancestors left be out to take over the world.