Reconstitution of a site of life of Gay habilis
© Dessin Andre Houot. Edition Wandering
Fossil men“Australopithecus”, name given to the most former fossil men, who lived in Africa between five million and 600 ' 000 years front J. - C. Their name comes owing to the fact that they were initially regarded as monkeys (pithekos in Greek) and because the first had been found in Southern Africa. The name of “australanthropes” is preferred today per many specialists. The recent excavations showed that their distribution extended in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia. Among the paleontologists whose names remain attached to the discovery and under investigation of these first hominoids, let us quote Raymond Dart for South Africa, Louis Leakey for Eastern Africa and the French Camille Arambourg and Yves Coppens for Ethiopia. The most important sites with Australopithecus are those of Swartkrans, Sterkfontein and Taung (South Africa), of Olduvai (Tanzania), the lake Rodolphe (Kenya) and the valley of Omo (Ethiopia).
The principal characters of the Australopithecus are a vertical station (or almost), a dental arch out of U, molars and canines of the human type, a projecting superciliary arcade, a reducing face, an accentuated prognathism. Their bipédie is indicated by the former position of their occipital foramen. As well in Southern Africa as in East Africa, it seems to have existed two quite distinct types Australopithecus.
First true men
The first had slender forms and hardly measured more than 1.25 m; its cerebral capacity was of 600 Cm3. This type corresponds about to the species Australopithecus africanus. One also attaches to it the télanthrope of South Africa, with evolved teeth, and the tchadanthrope of Chad, with the raised face, which seem to make the connection with the pithécanthropes or Homo erectus. The second type of Australopithecus was larger (1.60 m) and more robust; its cerebral capacity reached 700 Cm3. It presented moreover one sagittal peak on skull. It is in this type that the forms known under the names of paranthrope and zinjanthrope line up. According to certain specialists, these robust Australopithecus, with the herbivorous mode, would have died out without descent, while the species or the species slender, omnivorous, would have given rise to the pithécanthropes. However, this thesis is not allowed by all the paleontologists: robust and slender forms perhaps were, indeed, only those of male and female individuals of only one and even species. The question is thus far from being solved.
Another question outstanding: the existence, at the time of the Australopithecus, of a man more advanced than them. Certain remainders found in Eastern Africa, and seems it particularly advanced, received name, moreover disputed, of Gay habilis. Various discoveries, in particular those of two mandibles and a femur, plead however in favor of the existence of a man whose bipédie would have been more perfect than that of the Australopithecus.
In August 1972, Richard Leakey, the son of Louis, discovered close to the lake Rodolphe a skull, old man of 2.6 million years, and particularly modern: its cerebral capacity would exceed 800 Cm3, its superciliary arcade is reduced and its not very reducing face. An also important discovery, but of another kind, still took place in Kenya: it is about a fragment of mandible of old Australopithecus of five million years, which would locate the appearance of the first men at the tertiary era.
One cannot refuse indeed any more with the Australopithecus the title of men, and their incorporation with the Homo kind, recommended by certain specialists, would solve many quarrels. If the Australopithecus must be regarded as men, they is because they are probably the authors of the first known lithic industries, i.e. cut rollers: Yves Coppens thus discovered in Ethiopia a quartz roller transformed into sharp, and old tool 2 ' 200 ' 000 years.