comment on the statement: " early man began his life as a life a forest dweller ."
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The idea that early humans spent most of their time in and among trees has been boosted by evidence from a cave site in South Africa. This contradicts the standard view, which envisages early hominids in Africa running about on dry, grassy plains in the heat of the midday sun.
The new picture is emerging from a reconstruction of the environment in the Makapan Valley, northeast of Potgietersrus in northern Transvaal. R. J. Rayner and colleagues of the University of Witwaters-rand say that about 3 million years ago the Makapan area was much wetter and greener than it is today; the valley was shallower, the soil was more fertile and there was no pronounced dry season. The valley had significant patches of subtropical forest and thick bush rather than savannah, say the researchers (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 24, p 219).
In this habitat lived a lightly built or ‘gracile’ australopithecine called Australo-pithecus africanus. Remains of perhaps a dozen individuals have been found in the Limeworks Cave, or Makapansgat. More are known from another Transvaal site called Sterkfontein to the southwest, near Krugersdorp. The Makapansgat deposits are hard to date but australopithecines are thought to be about 3 million years old.
A. africanus is closely related to Lucy and her kin (Australopithecus afarensis), the gracile hominids found in the East African Rift Valley at Hadar, at Laetoli in Tanzania and elsewhere. In the past decade, researchers have shown that the East African rift was also lush with vegetation when the australopithecines lived there. For instance, the habitat at Hadar and Laetoli was a mixture of forest, closed woodland and grassland around the Rift lakes, with forest on the nearby mountains.
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Although Lucy lived around 3 million years ago, making her a contemporary of the earliest of the southern African gracile australopithecines, the A. afarensis group lived at least 4 million years ago. The famous footprint trails left at Laetoli – clear evidence of fully upright walking – are 3.6 million years old.
Unlike the East African discoveries, all the southern gracile australopithecines were found in caves, but these hominids were probably not cave-dwellers. Research at the University of Witwatersrand and the Transvaal Museum suggests that the animals and the hominids found at Makansgat were the prey of hyenas and large cats that used the cave as a den. The remains of hundreds of thousands of animal in the cave deposits represent leftovers.
Hyenas prefer to hunt and scavenge in open bush and grassland, ranging over several kilometres in search of prey. Hominids that ventured out of the relative safety of forests and woods did so at their peril. ‘They were not a major target for predators and scavengers because they occupied different habitats,’ says Rayner.
The new work supports the conclusions of Christophe and Hedwige Boesch. Their studies of the forest chimpanzees of West Africa suggest that for explanations of the physical and social characteristics of our earliest hominid forbears we should look at forests and woodland, not bush and grassland (New Scientist, Science, 19 May 1990).
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