While I can only imagine watching the early hominins from afar, I can easily place myself among these early Homo people. Crouching in a circle, we are all glancing back and forth, not merely imitating one another’s work, but watching for strokes made with the authority of how it should be and always had been …
Knowing my interest in human evolution, my son’s Texan mother-in-law gave me the brochure of an exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas that she visited, entitled “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figurestone.” The brochure contained many pictures of beautifully rendered paleolithic hand axes as well as naturally formed sculptures that had been “framed” by …
For a fossil to be designated a hominin there must be evidence of upright posture. However, any orthopedic surgeon can tell you that upright posture produces extreme vulnerability for injuries to the lower back (perennially among the top ER visits), hips and knees, so it is reasonable that the evolutionary advantages of such a costly …
Both facts that the Homo species hand ax was so widespread that it remained unchanged for 1.5 million years is attributed to the gregarious, noncompetitive nature of hominin groups.
Although language and tool making evolved together, much more important was the evolution of coordinated behavior.
I concluded that, in order for the newly evolved hominid entity of group authority to coordinate group behavior, a new form of communication evolved in which all group members had to be constantly gesturing to each other in order to “stay on the same page,” similar to the mutual interactions with constant small adjustments of …