Darryl Mocek

I watched 'From Ape To Man' on the History Channel over the weekend. It's a two hour show on how science has determined we (Homo Sapien) evolved from apes to upright, walking humans. The show was pretty much what you expected, with one twist (at least to my mind). The show follows science's search for "the missing link". That one being that hallmarks the halfway point between what is ape and what is man. Specifically, they discuss the discovery of Neanderthal man (lived about 40,000 years ago) and Lucy (lived about 3.2 million years ago). But instead of finding a single being which defined the evolutionary step from ape to man, they found a natural, slow evolution of beings which, strung together, shows the slow evolution of man from ape. All this is stuff expected from science and I learned nothing new here. However, the twist, which I found fascinating, is that there have, at various times over the past 3 million years, been more then one bi-pedal species living on the planet. Fairly recently a German scientist took DNA from the bone of a Neanderthal man, tested the DNA, and compared it with that of modern man. The conclusion is that Neanderthal man is a different species then Homo Sapien. Science believes that both Neanderthal man and Homo Sapien lived at the same time. Homo Sapien, due to their better intellect, flourished while Neanderthals became extinct. Apparently, there have been multiple times when more then one "human" species lived during the same period. Through natural selection, one species died out while the other continued...to become man.

BTW, scientists currently believe that the defining moment in our evolution is not when our anscestors starting using tools, but when they started walking on two legs. Scientists believe we started life in Africa, back when it was full of trees. As the trees started dying and the grasslands took over, our anscestors spent less time in the trees and more on the ground. When this happened, they started walking on two legs, to see over the tall grass for possible predators. As they became less dependent on their hands for "walking", their hands started to develop for other uses. As they started using their hands for other uses, their brains started to develop.