Our Direct Ancestors

Australopithecines, which emerged about 4 or 5 million years ago, are sometimes called "Ape-man" or "missing link" because they are on of the many transitions between ape and man. They were the first upright walkers. The fossil of the hip and knee joints tell us this. Perhaps they started walking to carry helpless infants. Infants of species with larger brains are more helpless at birth because they physically could not be born with large enough heads to hold a larger brain, so to compensate the brain develops outside the mother.

Donald Johanson found the first transitional fossil with an ape-like head on an upright body. This fossilized skeleton was Australopithecus afarensis or Lucy. Since this first find, many more transitional fossils are being found.

Cro-Magnon man is not really a seperate scientific classification. Cro-magnon is merely a group of Homo sapiens living 10-30 thousand years ago in Europe. In 1868, in the village of Les Eyzies in France, a group of skeletons were discovered. They were called Cro-Magnons.

A brief rundown of the development of man is:

• First we had different forms of Australopithecus.
• Australopithecus developed into a couple forms with only Homo habilis emerging.
• Homo habilis became Homo erectus.
• Homo erectus became Neaderthal man and Homo sapiens. Only Homo sapiens developed.
• Homo sapiens is now...us-human beings in 2006!

If primates are not our direct ancestors, than why do you suppose that we share 98% of our genetic makeup with them?

Jackie Wellman
www.jackiewellman.com