Planet of Life 6: Apes to Man

  1. 5 million years ago life thrived in Africa. Dinosaurs eliminated @ 65 million years ago by asteroid strike, etc. Purgitorius is the first known primate. Rainforests nutured primates.
  2. Proconsil discovered on Rosinga Island in Lake Victoria, Africa. It lived @ 16 million years ago. The species had 5 raised cusps on its molar teeth. This is a characteristic of anthropoid apes and humans. Proconsil was an arboreal (tree dwelling) species.
  3. Early scientists imagined a missing link after Darwin’s publications. They proposed the name Pithacanthropus. At the turn of the century Java Man was discovered in Indonesia. Peking Man Homo erectus was excavated in the 1930's. In Kadar, Ethiopia in 1974 a French/American team excavated Lucy (Australopethicus afarensis). The species was bipedal and stood about 3 1/2 feet tall.
  4. Dr. Randall Susman of New York University at Stony Brook studies origins of bipedalism by muscle comparisons between man and chimps. Chimpanzes share 97 % of our DNA. In Zaire the Bonobo live in maternal groups and are highly social animals.
  5. Dr. Satoshi Hori of Japan’s Institute of Genteics studies human evolution and indicates that humans branched from our ancestors about 5 million years ago.At that time volcanoes erupted in Africa forming the Rift Valley. It is a 3,500 mile fracture in East Africa. Dr. Eve Copon of the College D’ France indicated that arboreal primate species were separated by this activity.
  6. Mountains seperated inland rainforests from costal areas which became savannas. The separated primates diverged. The costal ones became bipedal. Leopard kills whose remains were dropped into caves are of a new species Parenthropus robustus. In 1984 at Lake Turkana fossils of Homo erectus were found. The species was @ six feet tall and had a brain size double that of Lucy.
  7. Early modern man Homo sapiens came on the scene @ 70, 000 years ago.