PREHISTORY: A QUICK GUIDE

The origins of humanity lie in the depths of the Palaeolithic. Our earliest immediate and direct ancestors, that is, those comparable to ourselves in brain size and erect posture, emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Yet the earliest regular use of tools by hominids – creatures with a slightly erect posture who had developed brains about a third or so the size of our own and those of our immediate ancestors (i.e., less than ca. 500 cubic cm [cc] against 1500–1600 cc) – dates to sometime during the four million or so years before our appearance. At this time, there was little to distinguish our ancestors from chimpanzees, who also use tools. Although the oldest traces of sophisticated tool manufacture and the creation of figurines date to less than half a million years ago this was still a period when the ancestors of our ancestors had developed brains with a cranial capacity only about half the size of our own (ca. 800 cc). This was still hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of our direct ancestors.

Significantly, our oldest real, immediate and direct ancestors, the Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH, i.e. like ourselves) who appeared sometime around 200,000 years ago in Africa, used the same tools as their slightly older contemporaries, the Neanderthals (who had a larger brain than ours and that of our ancestors, but belonged to a parallel line which broke off from our own around a half million or more years ago).