The First Men

The first men are hard to find. That is, they are hard to distinguish among all the remains of those who may or may not have been men. The bones of our earliest ancestors lay buried haphazardly beneath us and scientists argue about just what makes one of these skeletons a former man rather than a former ape. Was homo habilis a man? Home erectus? Homo neanderthalis? Are Cro-Magnons the only candidates worthy of recognition as men? For our purposes, let us consider as men those ancient hominids that were able to effectively manipulate their surroundings through complex tool use.

Our earliest ancestors first distinguished themselves from other animals when they picked up stones, sticks and bones and used them to further their own ends. We know that they used stones to scrape the flesh from the bones of dead animals and to shatter the harder bones in order to suck the marrow found inside. Most likely they used sticks and bones themselves as tools but evidence of such use is hard to come by, as wood and bone biodegrade, leaving only roughly shaped stones to tell us about our forefathers.

The first men were hunters and gatherers, roaming the Earth in bands of twenty to thirty close relatives. Most of their diet consisted of the vegetation that surrounded them, which varied depending on their specific environment.  Cereals such as wheat, barley or rice probably made up the largest part of any such band’s diet. They added to this any fruits and nuts that a particular region might offer. Occasionally, they discovered the carcass of a dead animal or even managed to kill game on their own with the increasingly sophisticated weapons that they fashioned from wood, bone and stone. Few of their young survived infancy and the adults probably hoped for only a few decades of life.

Sources

Durant, Will (1954). Our Oriental Heritage, New York: Simon and Schuster

TimeFrame (1990). The Human Dawn, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books

Human Evolution. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 27, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution