Early Humans (About 1.5 Million Years Ago)

Abstract

By a million and a half years ago, there were humans with skeletons that were very similar to our human skeleton. They moved around as we do, and their diet was more like our diet. Some of them had skulls that held a brain quite a bit bigger than the brains of our earlier ancestors, but even the largest was considerably smaller than our brain. Humans from this time traveled from Africa into Eurasia. Children with larger brains needed to be fed more food, probably more food than mothers could get on their own, even if they helped one another. It seems likely, therefore, that males lived in the family groups with the mothers and youngsters, helping to find food and fight off predators. The authors argue that the kind of cooperation and culture we see in these humans suggests that they already had language, but it could have been much simpler than the language we use.