Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived Read Online Free PDF Page B

unsuccessful evolutionary path. By current accounts,
boisei
roamed the plains of Africa for a million years, foraging the foods at hand and getting along, if not famously, then well enough. Ifwe measure success by how long species survive, we
Homo sapiens
, amount to little more than rookies still wet behind the ears. We have been in the game of life a scant two hundred thousand years.
Boisei
held sway on the Horn of Africa five times as long before exiting the gene pool. If we become this lucky, we will someday be dating our letters July 12, 802013.

    The other path plotted by the combinations of genes, environment and random chance was the one taken by members of a branch of the human family paleoanthropologists like to call gracile. This includes
Australopithecus garhi
, a creature who, along with
aethiopicus
, made his debut on the Horn of Africa about 2.5 to 3 million years ago. There is some slim evidence that
garhi
may also have fashioned simple stone tools, but as in the case of
aethiopicus
that’s a controversial and unresolved theory. At best,
garhi
may have used crude stone hammers to break open bones to get at the marrow inside, or sharp flint to scrape and hack meat away from a bone left behind by larger predators. But even these uses of rock mark a colossal technological advance.
    About 1.9 million years ago another gracile human, dubbed
Homo rudolfensis
, appeared along the shores of Lake Rudolph, now known as Lake Turkana, a long body of water that runs in the shape of an index finger from southern Ethiopia into the western heart of Kenya.
Homo habilis
and
Homo ergaster
soon followed, both slim and light–boned, both also passing their time in East Africa.
    In 1991 scientists scrounging among rocks near Dmanisi, Georgia, west of the Caspian Sea, unearthed the remains of still another species of gracile human from this epoch—
Homo georgicus
. While he remained simian in his looks, his face was flatter, a step closer to ours. Like
Homo habilis, georgicus
was a lean toolmaker, but with a considerably more advanced case of wanderlust. He lived in a river valley more than twenty-five hundred miles north of the grasslands where
Homo habilis
passed his days. He may be an indicator that other species, so far unknown, also strode beyond the borderlands of the Dark Continent, settling who knows where, still awaiting discovery.
    Although all of these species came upon the world clustered, like a posse, information about the majority of them is sketchy. Drawing any conclusions about them is a little like drawing conclusions about a long–lost family relative who headed off to the merchant marine or the French Foreign Legion. The best we have in most cases is a few battered bones that offer scant insights into the creatures’ lifestyles or appearance.
Georgicus
, for example, has seen fit to provide us with three skulls—one with jaws attached, one with a solitary jawbone, and one missing its jaws altogether. Nor did they leave anything much in the way of teeth, let alone whole limbs or vertebrae.
Homo rudolfensis
has bequeathed a similarly ungenerous array of jaws and skulls, and a scattering of other fragments that may not belong to the species. What we know of
ergaster
(the Workman) is based on a bundle of six or so skulls, jawbones, and a few teeth, several of which don’t much resemble one another, creating some lively academic brawls about exactly which species is which.
    The stinginess of these creatures makes them mysterious, even among our ancestors, humans who have steadfastly held the cards of their pasts close to their primeval vests. Of all these slender primates, however, one has been a little less secretive—
Homo habilis
, otherwise famously known as Handyman, long thought to be our direct ancestor and the first toolmaking primate. We have been able to infer a little more about the life of
habilis
only because we have been lucky enough to have stumbled across more parts of his body than his other